


toccata

by owlinaminor



Series: clothes on the floor [2]
Category: Bandstand - Oberacker/Oberacker & Taylor
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:29:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19772071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: “—and you pick them up and put them where they shouldn’t be.”





	toccata

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gabrielgoodman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabrielgoodman/gifts), [ftwnhgn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftwnhgn/gifts), [ohirareon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohirareon/gifts).



> two years ago, a week after I first saw bandstand, I drank an entire bottle of wine and wrote [it gets easier](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11446950). I started writing a companion fic from wayne's pov that same summer, but abandoned it for other projects. normally, I'm not the kind of person to return to and finish old wips, but... some characters, and some friends, are worth it. bandstand gc, this is for you. ❤️
> 
>  **important notes:**  
>  \- **["toccata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toccata)** (from Italian _toccare,_ literally, 'to touch') is a virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or plucked string instrument... generally emphasizing the dexterity of the performer's fingers."  
> \- content warning for suicidal thoughts/inclinations. (if you'd like to skip past this, scroll from any mention of a silver pistol to the top of the next scene.)  
> \- nick radel in this fic is played by joey pero. I love and respect alex bender, but joey pero was playing nick all the times I saw the show (and he's basically [the most talented trumpet player alive right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RshYRb5iy20%22)) so here we are.  
> \- [this fic has a soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/75hD8HFPqRY600z5WR0WB1?si=Sw2sOykVRN2y9aYtE45ZOA).  
> \- enormous thanks to [lau](https://twitter.com/laubeary%22) for not only proofreading this, but also for dealing with me as I talked about bandstand nonstop for about a month.

**one.**

> _Am I actually the captain of this ship I call myself?  
>    
>  — John Green, [describing his OCD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNEUz9v5RYo%C2%A0) _

“I know a guy,” Nick says.

This is his first mistake: if Wayne were there, Wayne would tell him to make his terminology more precise.

_“Your licks are obscene.”_

_Wayne looks up from oiling his slide. This guy—one of the trumpet players, Wayne thinks first chair, if that high C he started his solo on was any indication—is baby-faced, round cheeks still puffed out from pushing through his upper register and a sheath of dark, curly hair hanging over his forehead. He’s looking at Wayne with these big, dark eyes, glinting_ _like a flashlight on a mirror._

_“Thank you,” Wayne says._

_His voice feels oddly scratchy, quiet—and he realizes he hasn’t spoken at all since introducing himself at the very beginning of rehearsal._

_But the other boy holds his gaze and asks him about improv, offers him a free lesson._

_Wayne hesitates. He’s never improvised before. Notes on the page are comfortable; they’re logical; they don’t threaten to trap him if his mind moves faster than his hands. But with this boy_ _looking at him as though he’s a high note he is determined to reach_ _—he answers on instinct._

_“Okay.”_

_And the boy grins, tone too bright even for a march. “Meet me here before school tomorrow morning.”_

_He gets up to go grab his trumpet, but then turns—offers a hand, sweaty and red._

_“I’m Nick, by the way. Nick Radel.”_

_Wayne is halfway to homeroom before he remembers to wash his hands an extra time._

“I’m putting a band together,” Donny Novitski says.

He is out of place in the dressing room at the community theater, old white shirt and two-week stubble against a backdrop of colorful dresses and shiny belt buckles.

Wayne isn’t sure how he got in, much less how he found Wayne, but he’s done warming up and he has fifteen minutes before sound check—enough time to hear the guy out. (Not enough time to shake his hand.)

“It’s a combo, one to a part, all vets. We’re entering that NBC contest, and I think we have a real shot. I want you to join.”

“And why should I join?” Wayne replies. “I have three standing gigs, and a wife and kids to take care of.”

Donny steps in close—too close. Wayne can taste whiskey on his breath. There’s something about the inflection of his words—the _I want you_ —that reminds Wayne of a drill sergeant, marching dawn till dusk until each shoulder is square, each toe turns at ninety degrees.

“Radel said you were one of the best horns in Cleveland before the war,” Donny says. “What are standing gigs next to stardom?”

“Wait.” Wayne’s trombone starts to slip from his hands. “Did you say Radel?”

“Yeah. Nick Radel.”

And suddenly this is a high school band room in 1933—jazz is a deep breath and a wide smile.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m in.”

Wayne has been practicing trombone by the same order of operations since he was sixteen.

First: concert B-flat, long, low, steady, mezzo-piano expanding to forte. Second: lip-slurs, B-flat up to D, D up to F, F up to the next B-flat. Third: scales, B-flat, then B, then C, then up through the sequence, eighth notes on the runs and triplet arpeggios measured in at the end. Then: etudes, from the worn, reddish book he’s carried in his case ever since his first lesson, one slow and one fast, switched out every week so he doesn’t get cocky. After that: his charts, everything for the next gig and something for the gig after, timed to a metronome and measured with an even foot, tapping on hardwood, heel-toe, heel-toe. 

And finally, he pulls out a blues progression and stares. Puts the horn in his lap, then picks it up, then puts it down again, then grips it too tight, until his palms are slick like pavement on a hot July day, waiting for rain. Tonic, tonic, tonic, tonic, fourth, fourth, tonic, tonic, fifth, fourth, tonic, fifth. It’s simple, or looks that way.

He was back in shape for gigs after a few weeks. Six hours a day, and his lips were constantly buzzing and Grady started humming basslines. And Evelyn never wanted a goodnight kiss before bed, but he could return to the big band, the commercial scoring studio, the community theater. They didn’t keep the spots open for him, but he stood there repeating _wife and kids, joined the marines_ , let it crescendo—and now he has three standing gigs, as long as he writes his solos out the night before, tucks them into his etude book and commits them to memory when nobody’s listening.

His palms are slick—waiting for rain, or for melody. Once, in a high school band room, a kid with wild curls and bright eyes said, _play what you feel._ But now, he picks up the trombone and stares at the chart, and all he hears is white noise—and he stares—and he stares— and the white noise is boat engines, it’s artillery, it’s screams , it’s Evelyn yelling, _put that trombone down, it’s time for dinner—_

And Wayne sighs, and runs through a short cool-down, and goes into the kitchen.

The war has changed Nick Radel.

Nick walks into the club, a third-rate place off 9th Street with three beers on tap and a barely-tuned upright piano, and Wayne can see the changes from ten feet away.

Nick pauses in the entrance, slouches. Then marches forward—his movements are disjointed, like pulled-on strings—and for a second Wayne sees double—a man and his shadow. The Nick who strode into every room brash and bold, ready to hit the high notes or yell at the band to shut up until he slurred up there. And this Nick, a Nick who inches, eyes darting around, as though logging possible methods of escape.

He’s put on weight, but not evenly. Muscle in his arms, a trumpet in one hand and a mute bag in the other, and armor on his chest, overcompensating. His eyes are narrowed, and his forehead is ridged, and he is _sharper_ —as though the war took the brilliant boy Wayne knew and whittled him down to a point.

Wayne lets his last lip slur go on several beats too long. He wishes the sound could grow arms and legs, go to Nick and wrap him in warmth.

“Hey,” Nick says. His voice is lower than Wayne remembers. 

Both of them are half an hour early. The bar is empty, and should stay that way for a while.

Wayne lowers his trombone carefully to rest on the hardwood chair beside him, and stands. Takes one step forward, two steps, three. Looks at Nick Radel—the shadows cradling his eyes, the stubble on his chin, the slant of his nose, faintly notched, as though broken and set and forgotten.

There is a slow blues playing somewhere, a radio in the next room or a half-remembered chord progression in Wayne’s head. Waiting for melody.

He takes one more step and embraces Nick. Nick is shivering faintly—probably didn’t wear a warm enough coat, the idiot—and he is stiff in Wayne’s arms, at first. But he’s solid, a body and not a shadow. He’s here, grown and crossed the ocean. And he smells just like he did in high school, old books and hair grease.

Any moment now, the rest of the band will arrive, and they’ll have to revert to archetypes and definitions. Trumpet and trombone, friends from high school, _just a guy I know._ But until then, Wayne holds on tight and closes his eyes. He steps back into that band room, and he hears that open fifth, patient and kind.

Julia Trojan is very beautiful.

Wayne notices the beauty first: the poise of a model even in recycled gingham, a voice bright as birdsong on a sunny Sunday morning. She protests and waves her manicured hands, but it’s clear she’s having the time of her life up there on that mic, especially when Donny gets the tempo right. But there’s something endearing about her—wide-eyed and enunciating, shadowed like the rest of them, yet new enough that she isn’t weighed down by it.

Wayne nudges Nick, or Nick nudges him. It’s been years since he played this tune. He has no chart, and he only half-remembers the chord progression. But Nick’s articulation is tight and clear, easy to follow, and they come in on time.

“Kids?” Julia asks, after, her wide eyes holding Wayne still on his way out the door.

She is very beautiful, like a stained-glass window. Like she could melt him down to two dimensions, or extrapolate him back to four.

“Two kids,” he tells her. “Emily and Grady.”

“They have a talented father.” 

This carries Wayne home, lightens his steps as he pushes the back door open in the twilight, as he tiptoes past the kids’ room, as he slips into bed beside Evelyn. She’s curled tightly on her side, knees tucked beneath her chest and head bent, hair spilling across the pillow.

Once, Wayne would have curled around her, pressed a kiss to her shoulder. But that would only wake her, and she has work early in the morning.

“They have a talented father,” Julia said.

He runs through _First Steps_ again, chord by chord, until he falls asleep.

There are two pieces of paper hanging in the kitchen of the Wright household.

Wayne had wanted to hang them on the refrigerator door, but Evelyn insisted that it stay cluttered—a gallery of Grady’s kindergarten artwork, pink skies and fantastical anatomy. So the papers hang on the cabinets, kept flat with six pieces of scotch tape each.

First: a schedule. Wayne’s week, demarcated. He wakes at seven each morning, jogs a tight two miles to the lakefront and back, and showers. Breakfast (two hard boiled eggs and a piece of rye toast) must be ready by eight so that he can eat with the morning paper (news and sports) and begin practicing by nine. Practicing takes three hours. Then one hour for lunch with the rest of the paper (opinion, entertainment, obituaries).

The afternoons are taken up by rehearsals: at the community theater, or at the rec center, or at Donny’s apartment. If the Donny Nova Band is rehearsing, Wayne’s cleaning supplies must be laid out, so that he can chip away at the grime of Donny’s place one bathroom break at a time. Evenings are for gigs, and dinner must be ready when he returns—ham, potatoes, salad, white bread, a bit of fruit for dessert.

Second: a list of rules. There are twenty-seven of them, organized according to room of the house. Kitchen: the cabinets must always be closed; the forks must always enter the silverware drawers prongs first; dishes must not remain in the sink for more than an hour. Living room: the armchair must sit at a precise right angle to the coffee table; the coffee table must be clear of dust; the records must be lined up beneath the radio, organized by genre and then alphabetically according to composer or band leader. Bedroom: ties must be sorted by color; Evelyn’s dresses must not cross the halfway point of the closet; empty water glasses must not remain on the night table.

It’s a simple list. Almost self-explanatory. No reason for the rest of Wayne’s family not to memorize them. No reason for him not to call “Sixteen!” when Grady runs into the kitchen and sends his sneakers scattering, or “Twenty-one!” when Evelyn runs out the door for work without rinsing her coffee mug, or “Nine!” when Emily leaves her books piled on the couch.

He quizzes them at dinner, when his gigs don’t conflict with family mealtimes. Barks out numbers and glares until he receives the correct response. Doesn’t understand why Evelyn is staying later and later at the legal firm where she works—asking her sister to pick Grady up from kindergarten even when Wayne is free—having a glass of wine after dinner without inviting him to join.

“Then I’m breaking the rule, Wayne,” Donny says. “Relax, the sky won’t fall.”

 _How?_ Wayne wants to scream back. _How do you know it won’t?_ _Who put you in charge of holding up the universe, what the fuck are your qualifications?_

Nick asked him once, in the spring of Wayne’s last year in high school, why he played the trombone. He’d tried to shrug it off, said he needed an extracurricular his freshman year of high school and the marching band needed more low brass.

But Nick had stared at him that intense way that he has, as though Wayne was a violin prelude his teacher said couldn’t be transposed for trumpet. And so Wayne had explained the immense quiet of his childhood home, his father always away on business and his mother always away on something else, the way the hallways grew and grew until he felt like an ant just going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Escapes to the library on weekends led him to records, Sousa and Holst and Vaughan Williams, tone and precision and melody. He picked the loudest instrument he could fit in his closet, and he made it his top priority.

“Now—I dunno, it’s just the thing I’m best at,” Wayne had said. “If I wasn’t practicing, I’d be reorganizing the cabinets, or making lists of every street in Cleveland—this at least makes me useful.”

Nick had laughed at that, told him to keep practicing. Trombone is still the one thing Wayne’s good at, and he doesn’t know how to practice without the precision—scales, arpeggios, etudes, tonal progressions set in place since Bach. If he doesn’t know the scales, he doesn’t know how to practice, and if he doesn’t know how to practice, he doesn’t know how to demarcate his time, and if he doesn’t know how to demarcate his time—

“Wayne,” Donny says, after rehearsal one night. He’s still at the piano, scribbling at a score, and Wayne pauses halfway out the door.

“I have to get home to my kids.”

Donny waves one hand in the air, nearly sends the glass bottle atop his piano flying. “This will only take a sec, I promise. I just want you to hear something.”

And so Wayne stands, hat in one hand and trombone in the other, and listens. It’s a short piece, maybe four or five minutes, in a simple A-B-A format, but it’s unlike any other piano piece Wayne has heard. Donny’s left hand plucks out a slow, steady bassline while his right plays a melody in octaves, oscillating through major and minor in a way that would make Bach or Vaughan Williams scream.

“Did you recognize that?” Donny asks, spinning around to look at Wayne—and Wayne is struck suddenly by how young he is, shirt unbuttoned, legs dangling off the piano bench, vibrating with that frantic, youthful, constant need to impress.

Wayne shakes his head.

“It’s Gerswhin,” Donny explains. “Prelude number two. When he debuted this piece with his two other preludes in the 20s, classical musicians could’ve said he was breaking every rule in the book. But instead they applauded him, and called his work jazz.”

Wayne takes a step closer, lets his trombone rest on the floor.

“Look,” Donny goes on. “This is how music works—how I see it, anyway. You have to break the rules to do anything new and exciting, otherwise you’re just stuck in the same patterns. Me breaking rules, all of us breaking rules, will be what helps us to actually _say_ something—it’ll be why we win this contest. Does that make sense?”

Wayne looks at Donny—chest angled over the piano, empty bottle of whiskey on the lid—and wonders why _he’s_ doing this, what ghosts he’s keeping at bay with endless days rehearsing and nights composing.

“It doesn’t, really,” Wayne says. “But this is why you write the tunes and I just play my part. I trust you, Donny.”

And it’s strange—how open Donny’s expression goes at that, like peeling back a layer of plaster to reveal shimmering stained glass.

“Still, thanks for the private concert. It’s a nice piece.” Wayne collects his trombone and turns to go for real this time, listens to faint harmonies starting up again from the room behind him.

The pistol has seven pieces. Barrel, slide frame, lower frame, locking lever, barrel lock, spring frame, spring. Insert the barrel into the slide frame, push the slide assembly onto the lower frame, insert the locking lever, add the barrel lock, insert the spring in its frame, push the spring frame down and twist the barrel until it locks.

Wayne practices assembling it every day before dinner. He stands in the garage, takes down the black case from the top shelf on the back wall, places it on a stool, opens it with a soft _click._ He takes out each piece, one by one. Each piece needs to be polished until it shines, and each piece needs to be attached in the correct order, at an even speed, accents on one and three. If Wayne misses any part of the process, if anything breaks the rhythm, he has to put the case back and start all over. Sometimes he takes the pistol apart and puts it back together ten times before he gets it right.

Once he gets it right, Wayne practices aiming. Once in front of him, once in back, once to the left, once to the right. Like a drill or an etude, staccato and perfectly in tune. Accents on one and three. Sometimes he keeps the safety on, sometimes he doesn’t.

Sometimes, he holds the pistol up to his forehead. He closes his eyes, and the world narrows to the cool smooth metal against his temple. He imagines his mind flowing from brain to metal, a solo melody flowing into a chorus. He imagines the earth beneath his feet, turning so slowly, so slowly, it would throw cities into chaos if it stopped.

It would not stop, if he let go.

Wayne imagines houses of playing cards, constructed neatly on a table. He imagines jigsaw puzzles, pieces together edge to edge with only one spare that doesn’t quite fit. Evelyn makes enough to support the kids. She got along fine during the war. The kids would rather go see a movie than come to one of his shows. The clubs he plays at have other regular musicians, the community theater could find a new trombone easy, the VA wouldn’t mind paying one less bruised shadow to keep quiet. The pistol is cool and clear against his temple. The earth turns beneath his feet.

The earth would not stop turning, but there are other worlds, smaller worlds. There aren’t many vets in Cleveland who play trombone. Even if there’s another vet in Cleveland who plays trombone, there isn’t another vet in Cleveland who practices like Wayne. And there aren’t any vets in Cleveland who play trombone who have worked with the band like he has, who know the melodies and the articulations, who can follow the manic baton of Donny’s shoulders and the tether of Johnny’s drumbeat.

Wayne takes the pistol apart, piece by piece, and places it back in its case, then goes into the house for dinner.

Wayne hears it from the hallway—blaring trumpets, bold trombones, bass drum thumping in time with the front door as he slams it shut. A Sousa record, _The Thunderer_ , and it’s only getting louder as he marches forward, the hallway almost rattling with it, the photos ready to shake off the walls—

In the living room, it’s almost unbearable. Wayne’s skull is bounding. His space is unrecognizable—records scattered all over the floor—Grainger in with Mozart, Copeland with Rachmaninoff, Bach with Miller—some in their cases, some half-out, some stark naked—and Grady sitting in the center of the chaos, tapping along to the melody.

Wayne’s head is pounding, his arms are tense. Sweat pours down the back of his neck. _Chaos-chaos-chaos-chaos—_

“What have you _done?”_ he screams—and he’s grabbing Grady by the arm, pushing him back against the couch, the boy’s protest drowned out by the bass drum in his head, the piccolo in his ears, trumpet and cymbals and water pouring in and—

“Wayne!”

It’s Evelyn in the doorway, her apron half-tied, her voice ringing out over the trio. She marches forward, heels clicking on the hardwood, and pulls Grady out, draws him into her skirt.

Wayne stands for a moment—frozen—the trio shifts into the breakstrain, the trumpets are blaring again. He turns to the record player, switches it off. And now suddenly it’s too quiet—suddenly he can hear Grady inhaling, heavy and choked.

Evelyn looks at him—her face is tight, her lips pressed together as though to hold her back.

“Apologize to your son,” she says.

“I—” Wayne looks down at Grady. His son. Blonde hair, sticking up in the back, dirt stains on his white shirt, scraped knees. Eyes wide and brilliant blue, filling with tears.

“Rule number twelve,” Wayne says. “The records must stay under the radio, organized by genre, then composer or band leader.”

And now Grady is crying, red-eyes nose-watering crying. Wayne wants to go to him, aches for it, but his legs are lead, too heavy to lift.

Evelyn shoots Wayne a glare, then turns and kneels down, her skirt pooling around her. “Your father didn’t mean that,” she tells Grady. “He’s sorry. He’s just incapable of expressing it properly.”

Grady nods, but he’s still crying. Evelyn takes his hand and leads him out of the living room, and Wayne stands. Frozen. Like a shadow, or a corpse.

He spends the next two hours wiping off every record, organizing them according to genre, then composer and band leader. And he spends the next eight hours after that tossing and turning on the couch.

They win the first round because they have to, and they win because nobody else needs it more.

Wayne is grateful that his part isn’t too complicated on this one—just some long tones, a steady bassline, a couple of lip slurs—keeping the foundation steady beneath Julia’s feet as she teeters on bold heels and bolder lyrics. She teeters, then she soars, then she brings them home, and Wayne puts the full weight of his lungs into giving her the crescendo she deserves.

They win, and then it doesn’t matter. They have to pay their own way. It’s funny, how Wayne didn’t realize how much this contest meant to him until he’d lost it.

“How many bottles will it take to make this one go away,” Davy says, going sharp.

Wayne shakes his head—feels the press of silver against his temple.

“I can think of something quicker.”

He’s halfway done drafting his will in his head—Evelyn gets the house and the savings, Grady gets the record collection, Emily gets the biographies and bottled ships—when Donny says, _There is a train_.

There is a train. An escape, or a higher goal. A new distraction, or a reason to go on, or aren’t those equivalent anyway, depending on how you configure the definitions. And Wayne is ready to jump on it—forget wife and kids and three standing gigs, he’ll take any train out of the house of cards in his head, he’ll take—

“I think we are entitled,” Donny says, “to travel first class. Don’t you?”

There is a space, here, between the bar lines. A pause, or a stage to cross.

There is a space between the notes, as though the earth might stop turning, just for them.

“How?” Wayne asks.

_Whatever gigs, whatever bookings we can get—_

Look to your left, look to your right. There is a drumbeat beneath the music, the same drumbeat that wakes Wayne up at three in the morning, pounding. Accents on one and three.

Not many trombone players could follow this rhythm, could dive into these harmonies. Wayne will take any train that he can get, as long as this band is on the train beside him. Funny, how he didn’t realize how much this band meant to him until he’d lost it.

And he turns in the chaos, in the key change, and finds Nick—stripped down, voice raw with something like sadness or like hope—they were kids once, they knew what hope was, they riffed over her downbeats. They can find this tune again.

Wayne smiles, and Nick smiles back.

 _All of the wrongs will be made right this way,_ Donny says. He’s melodramatic, too optimistic or too good at lying to himself, but Wayne will jump on this train beside him anyway—will follow him to New York City or to hell, whichever comes first.

“We need to talk,” Evelyn says.

She flicks the overhead light on—Wayne had the single bulb from the lamp on the nightstand, reading a biography of John Adams, but this floods the room with light—almost blinding. He has to blink five times before his vision readjusts to her gray suit, her crossed arms, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, the hard lines of her face. She was beautiful, once, under the soft fluorescents, sliding onto the stool next to Wayne and telling him his articulation could use work and she’d read every Russian novel over five hundred pages and would he like to get a drink after his set?

She is beautiful, still, in their white-washed bedroom—but a different kind of beautiful, as though she molted when he wasn’t looking and grew a new, thicker skin.

“Can it wait until tomorrow?” Wayne asks. “I’m scheduled to be asleep in twenty-six minutes. Washing up and brushing my teeth takes ten.”

Evelyn sighs, and toes off her shoes—leaves them abandoned at an oblique angle.

“That’s exactly what we need to talk about,” she says.

He takes the duffel bag. It’s old, faded green, the strap a bit too short from when he had to sew it back on after wearing through the fabric, but it’s serviceable: fits slacks, shirts, cleaning supplies, two older suits for gigs and one tux for special occasions. It’s the same bag he took when he left for the marines, five years ago.

He takes the duffel bag, his trombone, and the black case from the garage—tries not to dwell on the look of relief on Evelyn’s face when he lifts it off the shelf for good. He doesn’t say goodbye to the kids. They’re asleep already.

And then he’s in a tiny room at the Hotel Euclid, staring at his duffel bag, his trombone, his black case from the garage, and the bottle of whiskey he bought on the way over. He opens the whiskey first, then the duffel bag. Then he closes the whiskey, opens the black case.

The pistol is cool and comforting against his temple. Familiar—like a concert B-flat scale, lingering at the top just to see how long he can go without a breath.

Wayne closes his eyes, and the world narrows. There’s a pounding in his head and he can force it to a crescendo—bass drums and cannon fire, a ship with a gas leak and they’ll never know who to blame fully but he was the officer on duty, he was—

Wayne’s hand shakes, his fingers slick with sweat. Fifty-fifty he’d miss, blow a hole in the wall and cost the hotel owner a fortune in repairs. And besides—there’s rehearsal tomorrow, Oliver’s on Tuesday, the Pavilion on Friday, the VA a few weeks after that.

Wayne wipes the pistol clean and places it back in the case, locks it with a click. He puts the case on the dresser, closes the duffel bag, and opens the whiskey again.

Through the yellow curtains, a streetlight winks softly off.

He is late to rehearsal the next day. Only by a few minutes, but Davy makes fun of him, and Julia whispers during the break that he can always talk to her, and Nick just looks at him, when he solos on _Ain’t We Proud_ —looks, and looks, and looks.

  


**two.**

> _Then I think again how the outer peel resembles paper, how soul and skin merge into one, how each peeling strips bare a heart which in turn turns skin…  
>    
>  _ — _Erica Jong, Fruits & Vegetables #5 _

“Get your things and come to my place,” Nick says.

He says something about a live-in maid. It has the syntax of a joke, but his inflection is something like one of his solos—too high, too brash.

And so Wayne collects his duffel bag, and his trombone, and his black case, and he composes a new schedule on the back of a blues chart, and he takes up residence on Nick’s couch.

“Can I reorganize your kitchen cabinets?” he asks. Nick groans, but he says yes.

_There are ninety-six lockers in the Lincoln-West High School band room._

_Four rows of twelve on the right wall, four rows of eight on the back wall, four rows of four on the left wall. The right wall’s lockers are smaller in size, temporary housing for clarinets and flutes and oboes, some trombones and saxophones, often stuffed with textbooks and abandoned worksheets to fill in the white space. The back wall has slightly bigger lockers: larger saxes, bass clarinets, trombones, pushed up and in by seniors kindly instructing their freshmen proteges on the complexities of sticky lockers and janitorial cleaning schedules. And the left wall houses euphoniums, tubas, percussion, these lockers large and square like the bassline of a march._

_Ninety-six lockers. Cages of silver bars and black locks, numbers scratched on in cracking white paint. Each one a universe unto itself._

_Nick is saying something about improvisation. Probably the same thing he’s said every morning since Wayne agreed to try this. Wayne should be listening._

_He counts the lockers again. Ninety-six. Four rows of twelve on the right wall. Four rows of four on the left. Four rows of eight on the back. And near the center of that back wall—second row from the top, third column over from the right—is locker 62. Unlocked, door ever so slightly ajar, its sole occupant lying on a chair just below. The day after Wayne was assigned that locker, he brought in a dishrag, cleaner, and polish. He wiped that locker down until its bars shone faintly in the fluorescent lights. He looked at that shine—caught a glimpse of his own face staring back at him, distorted in the bars—and felt something swell._

_And then, he’d waited for someone to notice. For someone else to compliment his devotion to cleanliness, to order. He hovered in front of his locker all before rehearsal, but nstood in front of his locker for a full half hour before rehearsal started that afternoon. Nobody said a thing._

_“You start with the chords,” Nick says. “You start with a basic rhythm.”_

_This is the same explanation he’s given every morning since Wayne agreed to try this. And yet it’s not quite the same explanation—there’s something new hidden inside, a change in color, as though Nick has been playing with a mute for weeks and finally took it off._

_“That’s not what playing is, though,” Wayne says. “Playing is hitting the right notes at the right times. You can’t just invent that based on a feeling.”_

_This is the same response Wayne has given every morning. But his tone, too, is off—a little sharp, perhaps, or a little louder._

_Nick puts his trumpet down, bell leaning half over the precipice of a creaky wooden chair. Wayne resists the urge to pull it back to a safer position. Then Nick marches to the front of the band room and opens the piano, an old upright next to a bulletin board pronouncing the semester’s schedule. He plays a fifth—B-flat and F. The floor beneath a chord’s feet, the opening beat of a tune._

_Waiting for Wayne to fill in a melody._

_“Try it,” Nick says. “Don’t think about the rules. Just play what you’re feeling.”_

_Wayne looks at ninety-five dirty lockers and one clean locker. He feels the cold metal of the bars, the faint scent of valve oil, the distorted stare of his reflection. Nobody noticed the locker’s cleanliness, but he knows it’s there, he knows the slick polish on his fingertips, he knows the quiet joy in the metal catching the morning sun._

_Wayne holds up his trombone and plays twelve whole notes over Nick’s twelve bar blues. Each note is the same, but it’s not quite the same—one has a harder release, the next a softer release. One has a brighter tone, the next a darker tone. One has a slight diminuendo, the next a slight crescendo._

_Each note is an empty locker, ready to be wiped clean._

Nick leaves his clothes on the floor.

He has a system, he says. This stack by the bed is clean, just back from the laundromat, organized vaguely by color or at least occasion, the dress slacks in this corner and the jeans in another. This stack by the dresser is bearable, worn once or twice and could go again, Nick’s favorite gray shirt for teaching and his navy jacket for gigs and a U.S. Army T-shirt, frayed, that he wears sometimes while he rehearses, lifts to his forehead to wipe away the sweat. And this stack, this stack by the bed, is ready for washing—Wayne can smell it from the couch—remembers it sometimes while he’s practicing and has to take a minute, just to breathe. 

Nick has a system, he says, but Wayne can only see the uneven shapes, the rough edges, the loose sleeves, the and stray socks begging to be tucked in. The piles tugpull at him—a stray thread on a wool sweater, unraveling and unraveling until he _has_ to pick them up, on instinct if nothing else—has to bring the piles to the laundromat one afternoon while Nick is out teaching and then fold everything, flat surfaces and cleansharp angles, organize by color, and fill the empty drawers in Nick’s dresser one by one.

When he gets back, Nick takes one look at his clean room, yanks open the drawers, and dumps all his clothes back out. There isn’t even a pile this time, it’s just fragments—like scattered chords or broken glass—expanding and consuming the apartment—there are pants in the living room and underwear on a curtain and jackets across the bed and Wayne nearly trips on a sweater going to the bathroom and _screams—the disorder the disrespect why even wash your clothes if you’re just going to put them on the floor again the disrespect the danger someone could trip and fall someone could—_

Nick takes a step backwardwards. 

“Okay,” he says quietly. “I can—I can fold the clean clothes.”

Wayne counts to twenty, and then ten, and then twenty again. His breathing slows, the pounding in his head returns to baseline. “Thank you,” he replies.

They sit down at the kitchen table that night, after Nick has picked up his clothes (too quickly) and folded them (unevenly) and returned them to the drawers (in no discernible order), and argue through a list of compromises. Nick’s clothes will be folded after a laundromat trip, if Wayne leaves them alone later. Wayne can buy groceries each Sunday, if he cooks four nights a week. Nick can get take-out the other three, if he disposes of the containers in a timely manner. Wayne can clean the bathroom twice a week, if he only does it when Nick is awake and not hungover. Nick can leave his beer bottles lying out when he goes to bed, if he throws them out first thing the next morning.

Two hours later, there’s a list taped to the fridge door. Nick refused to number the compromises, but Wayne counts twelve.

And so they reach equilibrium—except for when Wayne picks up Nick’s jackets and hangs them over his bedpost, and when Nick forgets about the beer bottle behind the armchair, and when Wayne insists he heard a mouse and the kitchen floor needs to be mopped now at four o’clock in the morning.

Equilibrium, or an early rehearsal of it.

Wayne is halfway through alphabetizing Nick’s record collection when he finds it.

Nick asked him to stop going through his stuff, yes, yelled about privacy and not being able to find anything, but Wayne couldn’t help—the crates of records were just sitting there, taunting him with their dog-eared edges and their uneven angles.

And so, one afternoon while Nick is out at a lesson, Wayne upends each crate in turn. He sorts the records by genre, then by composer or band leader, then restacks them neatly, makes labels from some old index cards, clears the dust as he goes. He’s working on a box of Grainger when something falls, lands on the hardwood floor with a slick _shlp._

It’s a slip of paper, not a track list or a bio, but a chart. Duke Ellington, “It Don’t Mean a Thing _.”_ Something about the paper quality or the color of the ink is familiar, and then Wayne sees the pencil markings.

 _Nick Radel, first trumpet, Lincoln-West High School._ He’s marked all of the flats and none of the sharps, circled all of the _fortes_ and none of the _pianos_. And he’s marked in a chord progression over the solo section—and Wayne can hear it, his wail, the way he’d always start on a slur up and trill until he found a melody.

There’s a whole folder of these charts. “Avalon,” and “Tea for Two,” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” all with _fortes_ circled and chord progressions added in Nick’s blocky handwriting. His writing is messier now, Wayne thinks. As though he’s no longer intends intending to actually read it.

Wayne flips through the folder, then lifts it up to the fluorescent light and, wonders what to do with it. L for Lincoln-West? H for High School? R for Radel? He tilts the folder this way and that, considering—and something else falls, not a chart this time but a half-sheet of paper, ripped along the center—a sketched-out map on one side and Nick’s writing on the other.

> _Nick –_
> 
> _It’s been a while. Hope you’re doing well. Still playing and all that. I heard you were teaching now, that’s good. It seems like something you’d be good at._
> 
> _I’m writing because I decided to join up. Serve our country. Protect our laws. All that bullshit. I’m a Marine now – I ship out to the Pacific tomorrow._
> 
> _I just wanted to let you know, in case I don’t make it back, that I’m sorry about what happened between us. About how things ended, I mean. You were my best friend, you taught me so much, and I love my family and the life I’ve built but I wish you could be a part of it. I wish we could have –_
> 
> _I shouldn’t say any more. But know I’ll be thinking of you, wherever I end up._
> 
> _– Wayne_

Wayne’s knees buckle. He sits down on the floor with a dull _thump._

He’s still there twenty minutes later, when Nick bursts in with a, “Wayne, I’m telling you, this idiot can’t even play quarter notes,” and a, “Wayne, I _told_ you not to touch my stuff,” and a, “Wayne, what are you doing?”

“I never even knew you got this,” Wayne says. His voice is surprisingly hoarse, stricken.

Nick drops his trumpet and takes three steps forward, takes three steps forward—kneels beside Wayne. He tries to grab at the paper, but his hands are shaking.

“I told you,” he says, “not to touch my stuff.”

“Nick.” Wayne turns, looks at him—this hardened shell of a man, all his scars worn on his face like a challenge. Wayne wants to take Nick’s face in his hands, wants to peel back the years, kiss the tears from his eyes and the lines from his forehead.

But all he can do is ask, “When did you copy this out?”

“POW camp in Colle Compito,” Nick says, the words all sharp, _forte_ and _marcato._ “Nineteen forty-four1944. I’d lost it, but I had it memorized. There was nothing else to do in there, and I needed—I needed something to hold on to.”

Wayne remembers rocky beaches, crowded boats, canon fire and the taste of saltwater.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Nick takes the paper back—folds it and puts it in his pocket. “You know, I was never really mad at you,” he says. “I was mad, yeah—and lonely—but not at you. Not in the end.”

He stands and offers Wayne a hand up. Wayne takes it, shaky, then offers to make dinner.

 _I was only mad at myself—_ that echoes in the kitchen, even as Wayne puts on a Cole Porter record and Nick sings along to all the trumpet parts and they manage to make beans and potatoes without burning anything.

The doorbell rings.

It’s three o’clock in the morning, or something approaching it, and Wayne is grateful for the distraction—he’s already switched sides on Nick’s narrow couch four times, already run through the safety protocols in his head six times. He pulls on a sweater and pads to the door, pulls it open with a quiet creak.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Davy says. “Think you can handle a sentry mission for the night?”

Davy’s tipsy. Well, Davy is always tipsy; it’s just a matter of the stage. Wayne clocks his red face, his unbuttoned shirt, and hypothesizes eight to ten drinks. But he’s still standing. And it’s cold out there, that must’ve helped. 

Nick—balanced with one hand on the doorframe, Davy’s arm slung across his shoulders—is not so in control. His shirt is unbuttoned, his hair is falling in front of his face, and his eyes keep fluttering shut closing—as though it’s taking all his willpower not to fall asleep.

“Hey, Wayne,” he says, drawing out the vowels. “Did you know—you can drink whiskey and pickle juice? Like, whiskey and then pickle juice? I just found out.”

He’s oddly soft like this—pliant, as though with a few more drinks or the right music, he could slip back in time.

“Yeah, I got it,” Wayne tells Davy. He steps out into the hallway, and together they take one of Nick’s arms each, stumble forward across the apartment and into Nick’s room.

Davy pulls Nick’s shoes off and pushes him onto his side, and Wayne goes into the kitchen for two glasses of water. He puts one on the night table and offers the other to Davy, who drains it in one go.

“Thanks,” Davy says. “Now—I think he’ll fall asleep quick, but you might want to keep an eye on him, just in case.”

Nick watches Nick now—on his side, legs tucked into his chest, one arm splayed out toward the edge of the bed, palm open. Toward Wayne.

“Yeah,” he says. “I will.”

Davy turns and heads for the front door, and he’s halfway out when Wayne asks, “How do you know him?”

“What?”

“Nick,” Wayne says. “You recommended him for the band, right? How do you know him?”

Davy gets his glass back off the kitchen table, fills it up again with water from the tap. The sink is oddly loud in the three-in-the-morning apartment—a misplaced cymbal in the middle of a ballad.

Davy takes off his coat, sits, and motions for Wayne to join him.

“We played a few gigs together, before the war,” he says. “I was actually the one who got him his first teaching job. Mrs. Matthews, a housewife who lived down the street from me, wanted somewhere for her daughter to be loud to get out her anger. I guess needlepoint wasn’t doing it.”

Wayne sits down across from Davy—pulls the chair in after him. It squeaks against the wood floor.

“Do you know why he started teaching?” Davy goes on.

Wayne shakes his head.

“He told me, there was a guy.” And Davy stares at Wayne, those eyes that stay clear even after two bottles of whiskey sizing Wayne up, ripping apart his life’s history to get at the bassline beneath. “A guy he was gonna play with, he thought. A guy who broke his heart. And he said he couldn’t be doing the club circuit after that, so I suggested teaching.”

“How—how much do you know?” Wayne asks. His head is pounding—not a bass drum but a host of timpani, three different pitches and none of them in tune. _Broke his heart, broke his heart, broke his heart._

Davy shrugs, as though to say, _enough._ He drinks his glass of water, then he says, “You ever been skinny dipping, Lieutenant?”

The question doesn’t make sense, but Davy is still staring at him, clear-eyed and calculating, so Wayne shakes his head. “No.”

“I have, once,” Davy replies. “On leave in Venice. It’s weird—feels alien, at first, to have your whole body up against the cold water like that, no barriers. Especially if you’re there with other people. But then you get used to it, and it’s like you’re part of the water, or the water is part of you—all open, nothing hidden.

“Nick is like that, all the time. He isn’t hiding. When he’s pissed, all of Cleveland knows he’s pissed. And if he was happy…” Davy raps his fingers on the table, a quick rhythm cut off before it can start. “I can only imagine.”

They’re both silent for a moment—Wayne, sitting straight-backed, and Davy, slumped forward against the table.

“Thank you,” Wayne says.

“My pleasure.” Davy stands, fills his water glass one more time for the road, and heads for the door again—closes it behind him with a quiet, “See you at rehearsal.”

Nick is already asleep when Wayne goes back to check on him. But Wayne watches for an hour anyway—the moonlight echoing across his face, the smoothed-out lines on his forehead, and his right arm, still reaching.

The strangest part of living with Nick is listening to him practice.

The clothes, the dishes, the odd hours—all of that can be dealt with., can take up the space in Wayne’s day that was once dedicated to picking up Grady’s room or helping Emily with her homework. But the practicing. Even when they were in high school, they only rehearsed together, or Nick played open fifths on the piano and Wayne attempted to find a melody. This is new, almost more private, as though Wayne is hearing the rehearsal for the rehearsal or seeing the sketch before the painting—rough, uncut.

 _Nick isn’t hiding,_ Davy said. He’s all scars and polished rage, long vowels and short consonants. And his playing is like that, too—unexpected.

He doesn’t start with scales. Well, sometimes he does, but usually he starts with a middle C, and then he slurs up—C, E, G, C, E, G, C, and once he reaches the top of his range he holds it, as long as he can, and twists it into something new. Sometimes it’s precise double-tongue like something out of an etude book, sometimes it’s slow blues like something off a Broadway stage, sometimes it’s in between, indescribable, like Nick could push himself into the next era of jazz if he just kept playing long enough.

He never practices their charts, for the band. Or if he does, it’s just one run-through, maybe pausing to go over a particularly tricky run. And if he practices scales, he does them last, runs through the whole cycle—C, C-sharp, D, E-flat, E, and so on up to the high C, and then he’s playing something new again, a ballad or a battlecry. Sometimes he ties his mouthpiece up with string and hangs it from a hook on his ceiling that he must’ve installed just for this purpose, blows into it long and loud with his hands tied behind his back. He never practices for more than two hours at a time, and after, he always goes into the kitchen and drains half a beer, his face sticky with sweat.

Wayne practices in the morning, and Nick usually practices in the evening—after band rehearsal, when he can mutter to himself about Donny’s notes and then ignore half of them. He practices in his bedroom, keeps the door closed.

Each time, Wayne almost asks him to just keep the door open, just this once. But the words die in his throat. Not enough lung support.

Wayne gets dinner with Johnny every other Thursday.

They do it at Johnny’s place, usually. Wayne meets him at the grocery store down the block and leads him through the apples and the tomatoes, the eggs and the meats and the long shelves full of cans, organized neatly by shape and color. Wayne loves grocery stores—the order of it all, the comfort in going to any store in Cleveland and knowing that lettuce will be next to cilantro, milk will be next to cream cheese. Johnny prefers to dance through them, swinging his arms in time with the music pumped in by the radio and asking couldn’t they get the sugary cereal, just this once?

Wayne’s never been a particularly good cook, but he’s practically a four-star chef compared to the other guys in the band. And it’s nice to practice, now that he’s not—well, he doesn’t—Evelyn’s not around. He checks out cookbooks from the library, tests out casseroles and paella and homemade meatballs, copies down his favorite recipes and brings them over to Johnny’s, asks Johnny to read out the instructions while Johnny practices swing rhythms on the counter. In mid-November, he brings over a baking cookbook—Wayne spills flour over the floor and Johnny accidentally steps in it, but their chocolate cookies are still successful enough that Davy buys them both drinks when they bring the batch to a gig later.

They do this at Johnny’s place, Wayne says, because he needs to get out of the house—away from the chaos of two kids, first, then away from Nick’s loud mess, later. But really, it’s because Wayne wants to check. Check that there are ant traps set in the kitchen, a plunger and toilet brush set up in the bathroom. Check that the sheet music on the stand by Johnny’s drum set is in order for the next gig, not missing any tunes. Check that he’s remembering the pain pills, before bed, with water, not beer.

“Hey, d’you remember when we met?” Johnny says, over the last of the wine.

Wayne does, but he shakes his head. “No, tell me.”

“We were in that hospital,” Johnny says, “in Saipan, right? You had just gotten over dengue fever and I was still recovering from when the shell hit and it flipped my jeep—three times, three times, three times, you know? And they were really understaffed, and this one nurse, you know, the one with the incredible red hair, she said she needed a volunteer to make sure I took my pain pills. And you, at the other end of the room, you said, ‘He’s a grown man, can’t he remember himself?’ And I said—” He always starts laughing at this part, but Wayne looks at him, deadpan, until he goes on—“I said, ‘Mom? I thought you were in Beachwood?’”

Johnny keeps laughing, sloshing the wine. “I can’t believe I thought you were my mom, man. It’s funny. It’s funny, right?”

“Yeah,” Wayne says, smiling at the memory. Johnny never talks about the day after that, when they sat together on Johnny’s tiny bed and traded off jazz standards until Johnny was straight-up inventing titles and Wayne had forgotten to bark, _don’t call me lieutenant_ at the nurses. Wayne isn’t sure if he remembers. But that’s alright—Wayne remembers enough for both of them.

“Yeah,” Wayne says. “It’s really funny.”

The moon winks at him softly, gently.

The blinds in Nick’s living room don’t close all the way. No matter how hard he tries, Wayne always sleeps beneath these patterns of light and shadow—the moon, the streetlight, the neon sign at the twenty-four-hour deli down the street. The lights shift and spin in time with the wind.

Wayne has run through the safety protocols three times and the chord progressions for the Donny Nova Band’s current set twice. But he still can’t quite get comfortable, can’t lie still.

He sighs, swings his legs over the side of the couch. Maybe a glass of water will help.

He heads into the kitchen, then stops, crossing the doorway to Nick’s room—held captive by the sound of choked breathing, faint murmurs.

_I don’t know anything, I’m just a private, I swear, I’m sorry—_

Wayne pushes the door open. He follows it, and now he can It swings inward and he follows it, able now to clearly see Nick tossing and turning on the mattress, his legs tangled in the sheets and his face slick in the moonlight, his mouth twisted in something like a cry of pain.

Two nights ago, Wayne awoke from a nightmare to find Nick crowded on the couch beside him. It was close quarters—Nick’s head resting on Wayne’s chest, their legs twined together. Close quarters but warm, comforting, another body in the bed and another heartbeat, steady, in counterpoint to his own.

Wayne fell back asleep then, more easily than he has since before the war, and it is the memory of that warmth, that heartbeat, that pulls him closer to the bed now. One hand hovers, aches to brush Nick’s curls back from his forehead—

Nick flips onto his other side, one arm flailing out, and grabs Wayne’s hand—his grip tight enough to burn.

Well. That settles it. Wayne sits down, swings his legs in, then lies on his side, curls his body around Nick’s. Nick shakes at first but he grows quiet, returns to baseline, heart going _ritenuto, ritenuto, moderato._

It is against the rules, Wayne decides as he drifts off, for them to sleep apart ever again.

“I want to know what you have nightmares about,” Nick says.

It’s late, the evening after a gig, and they’re in the living room—Nick in the armchair, flipping through a beat-up paperback, and Wayne on the couch, reading the last of the day’s paper (comics, sports, obituaries).

Wayne folds the paper—slowly, with a soft rustle of black and white pages—and sets it on the coffee table, then sits up and looks at Nick. Nick is leaning forward, his eyes narrowed and his fists clenched, as though readying for a fight. Last night, he had shouted so loudly in the middle of a nightmare, he woke both Wayne and himself up, and it took Wayne drawing smooth circles on his back, each a precise 360 degrees, for him to fall asleep again.

“Okay,” Wayne says. “But you tell me yours first.”

And so Nick takes a drink of his beer, drains it down past the label, and he talks. He tells Wayne about the camp, the utter terror of it, not knowing which of his friends would get called for questioning or if he’d come back. He tells Wayne about the thin meals, how he’d give half of his to his cellmate who had a fever and would then sit up shivering. He tells Wayne about the time he was called in finally, how he, didn’t have anything to confess so he just shouted increasingly and more obscene insults until he was thrown in solitary.

“And the worst part is,” he says, fingers gripped around the bottle like a lifeline. “I didn’t even _do_ anything. Barely got six months of action before I was captured, and then I just sat there rotting for two years, and then the war was over. I don’t even deserve to be in the band, really. At least you actually _fought_.”

Wayne wants to say something—wants to reach out, cross the distance and give Nick something to hold onto—but he’s still forming vowels when Nick sits back and, turns to him.

“Your turn.”

And so Wayne stands up and begins to pace, his feet falling in time with the pounding in his head, and he talks. He tells Nick, in precise chronological order and with all the available numerical details, how a ship containing forty-five U.S. Marines of the sixth division suffered a gas leak and blew, taking twenty-seven men with it. The rest of the platoon made it to the beach and joined the rest of their company, but Wayne couldn’t let them call him lieutenant anymore.

“If I had just checked more carefully,” Wayne says, pacing so quickly now that Nick’s apartment passes in a blur, kitchen-living room-kitchen. “If I had just taught them the protocol better. If I had just—”

“Wayne.” There’s a hand on his arm—Nick pulls him to a halt and holds him there. Wayne should push him off—think of the sweat, the germs—but he stays, held. Nick’s eyes are very close and very dark, deep as the center of Lake Eerie.

“Stop it,” Nick says. “You did all you could.”

“But—I was responsible for them,” Wayne replies. He feels useless, like his first trombone lesson, when he could barely get out a C. “And then Evelyn, and—I don’t have anyone to be responsible for now.”

Nick tightens his grip, brings his other hand up to cradle Wayne’s face, brush the hair out of his eyes. His hand is warm, solid. Wayne leans into his palm.

“You can be responsible for me,” Nick says. His voice is low, but steady. Like a harmony, like a promise.

“Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, huh?”

Wayne sputters halfway through a long tone exercise. He pokes his head up above the pit and finds Nick there, grinning—and for a moment this is a high school band room or a seedy jazz club, this is a sudden need to be closer.

Wayne rests his trombone carefully on the folding chair, shuts off his stand light, and hoists himself up to stage level.

“Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” he says.

Nick shifts so that they’re shoulder to shoulder, their legs dangling over the edge of the stage. It’s a full house tonight, student groups and old couples and families, mothers with pastel sweaters and little girls with pigtails, marveling at the colorful costumes.

“Maybe, if you’re a trombone player,” Nick replies. “Trombones could never lead a parade, that’s the trumpet’s job.”

“We did it that way at my high school,” Wayne says.

Nick looks at him, shocked, as though Wayne just suggested tuning from a bari sax.

Wayne smiles at him in response. “Yeah, it’s not uncommon in marching bands. Keeps the slides from hitting anyone.”

“Oh, I get it, you had to go in front ’‘cause you were too clumsy not to knock the trumpets in the head.” Nick shoves Wayne’s shoulder as he says it, as though he couldn’t knock Wayne off the stage with words if he wanted.

And Wayne is about to chastise Nick for ruffling his suit when he catches familiar faces in the audience—a blonde boy in a blue cap and his sister, her hair tied back with a ribbon, arguing with their mother—pleading with her, pouting, and then marching down the aisle finally, shouldering past old couples and gangly teenagers to approach the stage.

Wayne reaches out, but they stop a few steps away—they leave him suspended. Legs dangling in the air.

“Mom said we should come say hi,” Emily says. She folds her arms across her chest. Grady follows suit. Next to Wayne, Nick has gone very still.

“Hi Emily,” Wayne replies. He keeps his hands tucked under him, lets his knuckles go white. “Grady. How are you liking the show?”

“It’s so cool!” Grady says. “Harold Hill is so funny. And your part is so loud, we can hear you from—” Emily glares at him. “We can hear you,” he repeats, looking down at his shoes. They’re white tennis shoes, barely scuffed. Wayne doesn’t recognize them.

“It’s fine,” Emily says. “The plot doesn’t really make sense.”

“Well, thank you for coming,” Wayne says. “And, uh. Tell your mother…”

Emily glares at him—studying him, drawing him up and cutting him down in the same cold spotlight. She is so like her mother, bold and brilliant and ready to take on the world. Wayne wants to cry.

“Tell your mother thank you,” he says. “And, uh—kids, this is my friend Nick. He’s in the band with me, he plays trumpet.”

Wayne looks at Nick—still frozen—then elbows him into giving a tiny wave.

“Nice to meet you,” Emily says. She spins on her Mary-Jane heel and marches back up the aisle, Grady trotting along after.

The theater is packed, all the cacophony of a hundred people trying to have unique opinions about the show and another two hundred trying to find the bathroom, all the cacophony of a hundred people trying to have unique opinions about the show and another two hundred trying to find the bathroom, but all Wayne hears is those receding footsteps, echoing like a bass drum in his head.

“They look like you,” Nick says, quiet. “She has your eyes, and he has your smile.”

“They both have their mother’s mind though, thank God.” Wayne articulates it like a joke, but it has the tone of a ballad.

And Nick looks at him, and looks, and looks—enough depth for seventy-six trombones, a hundred and ten cornets, or at least enough of both to make it through act two.

“Good luck in the second act,” he says. “I’ll listen for you.”

He jumps down and heads back to his seat right as the lights dim for the end of intermission, leaving Wayne staring—thinking of parades, and imaginary families, and intertwining melodies.

Nick is humming _Lida Rose_ the next morning, when he makes coffee.

Wayne begins practicing at nine in the morning.

His schedule is solid as a metronome. Wake at seven, jog two and a half miles to the park and back, shower, breakfast at eight, practice at nine. He pulls out a chair from Nick’s kitchen table, lifts it a few inches so that it won’t scrape on the floor, and sets it down beside the living room window. It’s cold outside, dry air and bitter wind coming off the lake, but the sun is shining through the window, glinting off the silver metal of Wayne’s music stand.

He starts with long tones: concert B-flat, long, low, the air growing warm as he pushes it out of his lungs and through the body of his trombone. He cannot see the air emerge out of the bell, but he can still close his eyes and shrink the world to this passageway: lungs, mouthpiece, tube, bell. Long tones, lip-slurs, scales, etudes. And then his charts, everything for the next gig and something for the gig after, timed to a metronome and measured with an even foot, tapping quiet on the hardwood, as though if Wayne went too fast he’d wake Nick, asleep in the other room, even though he knows Nick rarely stirs until afternoon.

Donny has arranged a new piece for their gig at the Rio next week, even though it’s all of two weeks until New York and he should be refining their concert song. (Wayne said as much at yesterday’s rehearsal, and Donny pulled out the score for “Love Will Come and Find Me Again,” covered with red pencil marks. When the man is finding time to sleep, Wayne has no idea.)

The new piece is a variation on a theme from Copland’s _Rodeo_ ballet, re-cut and arranged for jazz band with space for improvisation. Jimmy and Nick have most of the hard riffs, but Donny’s given Wayne one intense part, he suspects transcribed from the cello line, that requires him to switch quickly between slide positions _and_ double-tongue, and no matter how many times he practices, he can’t get through it without slipping. He tries reducing the metronome, brings it all the way down to sixty 60 beats per minute bpm and works up steadily five5 beats per minute bpm at a time, but every time he gets to ninety-five 95 he messes up, hits a B-flat instead of a B-natural or a D instead of an E or fumbles on the sixteenth note rhythm.

_Nick, Donny, all of the others, they’re all real talents. Nick solos ten feet above the ground, Donny could write a new standard just fooling around on the piano after a few drinks, Jimmy can play something like fifteen instruments, Julia sings like a Broadway star. They deserve New York, Hollywood, the whole world standing at their feet and cheering. Wayne just plays trombone because he doesn’t know anything else._

Wayne stands, sets his trombone down on the chair with a soft _clink,_ wipes the sweat from his face with the bottom of his shirt. He goes to the bookshelf beside the couch, the one he’s been using as a makeshift dresser, and takes out the black case.

It takes him five tries to assemble the pistol. He keeps getting the order wrong, or forgetting to polish a piece before he adds it, keeps taking it apart and starting over. But finally it sits, cool in his palms, shining in the sunlight. A familiar weight.

He practices aiming. Right, left, forward. First with the safety on, then with the safety off. And then he presses the barrel to his head and closes his eyes.

The world narrows.

Wayne breathes. In, out. In, out. In, out. The pounding in his head grows and harmonizes with the sound of gunfire. His hand shakes—

_“Wayne!”_

Wayne opens his eyes.

Nick stands in the doorway—barefoot, hair sticking up, eyes wide—and then he’s charging across the room, footfalls loud and angry—

He knocks the pistol from Wayne’s hand and grabs his wrist, holds tight as the pistol drops to the floor.

The world spins back out, and suddenly Wayne is too aware of everything—the sun, the wind shrieking outside the window, the smooth floor beneath his socks, the thump of the radio, the lingering scent of coffee. And Nick, at the center of it all. Nick standing, standing, not a ghost or a shadow but a body, skin and bones and arteries and lungs, moving in and out. Wayne tries to move his hand but Nick won’t let go. Wayne can see blue veins rising from his wrist.

“Don’t you dare,” Nick says, his voice shaking. “Don’t you fucking dare. You idiot, don’t you know how important you are, don’t you _know—”_

Wayne wants to protest, wants to say he’s just a trombone player, a hollowed-out shell of a broken trombone player, clinging to schedules and rules just to keep his marionette legs marching. But it’s hard to argue with the look in Wayne’s eyes, fervent, as though he fought a war and a host of demons just for this.

Nick’s voice is shaking, and there are tears slipping down his cheeks. He brings up a hand—the one not still holding Wayne’s wrist—to wipe at them but the tracks remain, like stains or like scars.

“You said you would be responsible for me,” Nick says.

Wayne looks at the pistol—shining silver in the middle of the wood floor, surrounded by the couch and his trombone case and Nick’s crates of records, neatly alphabetized and labeled. It is out of place in this apartment. Too polished, too sharp. Too whittled down in this place that is always flooded with sunlight or with sound. In this place where Nick wails two octaves up to a high C and Wayne cooks pasta for dinner, where they sit together on the couch after and listen to the jazz station on the radio, making fun of all the bands that aren’t quite articulating together.

Wayne looks at the pistol, and then he looks back to Nick.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t—don’t be sorry,” Nick replies. “Just don’t do it.”

Wayne nods. Slow and steady, like a bassline, like the beating of his heart.

They cross the room together, to the spot where the pistol landed, Nick still holding on to Wayne’s wrist. Nick picks it up, and Wayne instructs him in disassembling it: spring, spring frame, barrel lock, locking lever, lower frame, side frame, barrel. Nick returns each piece, closes the case, and places it on the highest shelf above his bed.

Then Nick calls off his lessons for that afternoon and pulls a kitchen chair out, sits down next to Wayne and works through the tricky Copland line with him, over and over, his voice going gentle and low like when he talks to his students, the young ones, the ones who really want to get it right.

By the time they go to band rehearsal later, Wayne can play his part perfectly.

“You’re a selfish bastard, you know that?” Wayne tells Nick.

He doesn’t mean it, not exactly—Nick is selfish in the way that a pistol is selfish. Take it apart, clean it, count to ten, put it back together again. Sleep with it under your pillow, or on a shelf in the garage. Claim you’re protecting yourself, when really all you are is the threat of the blast— _I’ll take myself down before I take any of you._

“Donny and Julia deserve all the happiness in the world,” Wayne tells Nick.

And he doesn’t know how to say, _and so do you._

_CLANG. CLANG. BAM. WAM-WAM-WAM-WAM-WAM._

Wayne is up and on his feet before his eyes are even open, tracing the sound—cannon fire? Engine malfunction?

There’s a light, blinding, in front of him—but it’s not moving, it’s not burning, it’s just flickering, faintly, like a candle with a wax circle the size of a dinner plate.

Wayne closes his eyes. Counts to one, two, three, four, five. Opens.

This is Nick’s apartment. Nick’s living room, with the Glenn Miller poster and the stack of cardboard boxes that “might come in handy someday.” Nick’s kitchen, with the broken saltshaker and the cabinet that won’t quite shut, the scrawled lesson schedule on the fridge and the stack of dishes—

The stack of dishes, currently only two plates high because Nick is standing there, muttering curses as he scrubs the pot they’d used for pasta earlier that evening. His jeans are slung low on his hips his hair is curling up above his forehead, and his elbows are bright red.

“Nick,” Wayne says.

Nick pivots— _clang_ goes the pot—and suddenly Wayne is back in that band room, staring at this kid who runs so loud and hot except when Wayne touches him, gentle, on the shoulder, to ask if he can move so that Wayne could open his locker.

His sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are bare.

“Nick,” Wayne repeats. “What are you doing? Don’t you know that lye stuff is dangerous—not lethal or anything, but it burns, and it’s really not great in the long term—”

Nick stares, wide-eyed, and then snarls. “Well, fuck, man, why didn’t you say so? We’ve got a gig tomorrow, I need these fingers.”

“I’d have said so if I’d known you were gonna wash dishes in the middle of the night—I could’ve loaned you my gloves.”

Nick opens his mouth to respond then pauses, lips hanging open like he’s imitating one of his idiot students, played a high trill before he was ready and forgot how to breathe.

“Wait,” Wayne says. “Why are you washing dishes in the middle of the night?”

Nick raises his hands, drops them. Folds them against his chest. “You’re always saying I should do something to keep my space clean, so I was doing something. As a surprise. Since, y’know.”

Wayne wants to take a step forward. Reach out. Say, hey, climb in my locker, you look like you could use the warmth.

“I don’t think I know.”

And Nick turns, reaches into the sink, and holds the pasta pot aloft, suds glistening faintly in the light, like the last decrescendo of a ballad.

“Happy birthday, Wayne.”

They finish the dishes together: Nick washes, Wayne dries. The next day Nick wears Wayne’s gloves to the gig, scowls at all the guys who say he’s like a matron in a refrigerator ad, and Wayne laughs at how red his face goes. Laughs, wonders if he would’ve remembered his birthday, if Wayne hadn’t done anything.

There are fifty train platforms in Grand Central Station.

Numbers 11 through 21 on the east side, 31 through 42 on the west side, 22 through 30 in the middle. And there are eighteen more platforms below: numbers 100 through 117, down by the dining concourse. But Wayne focuses, for now, on the platforms he can see: nine of them, 22 through 30. Nine train platforms, nine marble awnings with black lettering, nine shining reflections of the constellation ceiling. Nine avenues for movement—businessmen in sharp suits and girls with teetering suitcases and families, of course families, mothers with dinner-plate hats and three purses all different shapes, and fathers with scuffed shoes and lines across their foreheads, and boys in sailor suits, their index fingers pointing up, up, up.

Wayne stops and spins, his gaze bouncing from Pplatform 24 to 26 to 28 and back again, trying to catch them all. They came out of Platform 30 a minute ago, the train clattered in like a swing band landing on a fermata, all sound and steam. And now Wayne is one piece of coal in the great engine of New York City, slowly burning. He needs to catalogue this—the platforms, the numbers, the laws of physics being formed and broken around him. He needs to solidify the numbers and the families, make them heavy in his left hand as the trombone case is in his right.

“What’re you doing?”

Wayne blinks. Refocuses. Nick is there: trumpet case, hat hiding his curls, dark jacket tight around the shoulders, as though he outgrew it but couldn’t quite bear to replace it. Nick doesn’t quite fit beneath this emerald ceiling—standing still, potential energy among the kinetic. But then, he is vibrating faintly, he always is, pulling and pulling until he’s got the whole weight of the earth hung around his wrist, ready to project back out the next time he solos.

“Counting the platforms,” Wayne says. He pulls out his left hand and gestures at them.

“Why?” Nick asks.

“Because I want to remember everything.”

Wayne looks at Nick—train platforms, lockers, it’s all potential energy, all holding rooms until you reach something greater. _There is a train,_ Donny said. And it will take us away from here, it will give us a purpose. Nick is all purpose, probably could’ve come here on his own years ago if he’d wanted, but he stayed in Cleveland, locked in a golden band room or a glass bottle, wore his scars on his face or on a B-flat blues. He could’ve come here on his own years ago, but he came here with this band.

The rehearsals, the Pullman car champagne, the countryside rolling past like a hundred postcards stitched together—it all folds in and crescendos to this. Grand Central station. New York City. The center of the world, or where it begins.

Wayne looks at Nick, and Nick looks back. They count the platforms together: eleven on the east side, twelve on the west side, eighteen on the lower level, and nine in the center. Fifty in total.

After, they end up almost sprinting to catch up with the rest of the band, but it’s alright. Donny gives them a look that seems to say he understands why they needed to stop, and the whole band walks to the hotel slowly, counting each streetlight and shop window on the way.

Once they get to the hotel, and Nick checks that their view is up to par with everyone else’s, and Davy checks the mini bar, and Donny checks for cockroaches, and Julia smushes the one cockroach he does find under the toe of her high heel, and Wayne goes to the bathroom three times just in case—they split up.

It’s just practical. There’s a lot of New York to see and only a few of them to see it. Donny takes Julia out to a nice dinner, because of course he does, while Davy looks for a bar he’s heard about and Nick and Johnny head downtown in search of record stores. Jimmy wants to check out the Metropolitan Museum, and Wayne tags along—partially because that kid couldn’t read a subway map if his life depended on it, and partially because he thinks it’s what Evelyn would’ve wanted him to do. Maybe he’ll get her a postcard.

The Met is overwhelming, and free. Wayne can’t believe it—has to whisper at Jimmy as they’re crossing beneath marble ceilings into the Greek wing, do they really let just _anyone_ walk in here, into this palace with the smooth tile floors so polished he feels guilty for stepping on them? Jimmy pushes his glasses up onto his nose and says of course, art is free and for the people, but his voice is shaking a little as he says it—the faintest vibrato.

They get lost, because of course they do. They forgot to pick up a map, and they’re never entirely certain which wing they’re in. Wayne keeps stopping to read the placards or count the legs on horses in the Roman vases, and Jimmy keeps stopping to tell Wayne that it’s not supposed to be _realistic,_ it’s about _style,_ and anyway it’s impressive that the ancient Romans had figured out how to draw horses in the first place. One or the other of them keeps wandering off, and then the other one has to shout at him to get him back on track, and then a security guard with a red tie and deep-set wrinkles has to wag a finger at them both and remind them to be _quiet, please,_ this is a _museum._

After fifty-three rooms and some six hundred and twelve placards, they land on a wooden bench in the American wing. It’s mostly empty, except for an art student sketching from some landscape and a security guard lurking at the end of the hall.

“Oh,” Wayne says. “I recognize this one.”

Jimmy looks at him sideways—his face is faintly pink, from all the walking or all the lecturing Wayne on light and composition.

“So do I,” he says. “We’re vets, it must be programmed into us at base camp or something.”

Wayne ignores the sarcasm and focuses on the painting. He’s seen it before in textbooks, but that’s nothing like the real thing—George Washington, larger than life, one foot on the prow of the rowboat like a god ready to remake the world. The sun shines down, illuminating the men pulling the oars and the bayonets ready to spear Redcoats and the flag of the new Republic, flying in the breeze even though that’s wholly impractical—this was a stealth mission and a massive piece of fabric would be the first thing they’d shoot at.

“It’s weird, isn’t it,” Jimmy says quietly. “I mean. It’s nothing like that.”

Jimmy’s right, of course he is, but he’s stating the obvious. _It’s nothing like that._ Saying that is going up to a brass player and saying _you play loud,_ it’s going up to a soldier and saying _you will need to kill people._ You know it, logically, but you can know something your whole life and never stand up in front of it, never look it in the face.

“Do you ever think about—those songs we play, they’re not real either,” Jimmy says. “I think that’s why they’re so hard for Donny to write.”

This, too, is stating the obvious. It’s three glasses of whiskey and a broken record player, it’s blood on the piano and solos that go too sharp, because otherwise they’d shatter. Julia has always been able to do this—look at you, down to the bare unadorned melody of you, and sing it out. She’s beautiful and sharp, she’s the swinging chandelier that illuminates the whole hall just in the moment before it crashes. She’s always been able to do this, it’s why Wayne stayed in the band in the first place, but he never knew that Jimmy could, too. Well, of course he can. He’s studying to be a lawyer, he’s studying to read between the lines and unearth leviathans.

 _The boys are back, and ain’t we proud._ Sometimes, when Donny sings it, it sounds like a question.

Wayne looks back at the painting. Washington, large, and Delaware, small. There are eleven men in the rowboat with him. Five on the oars, fighting the water. Three huddled in the back, keeping the bayonets from flying off. One watching the side, giving directions. And two holding on to the flag. Wayne wonders if they were based on real men. If they had names, families. How many of them completed their service on this mission and how many were left haunted, bombs and voices echoing. The Delaware must have been cold, Christmas night, 1776. It must have been hard not to jump in.

“There was a gas leak,” Wayne says. “On the way to Okinawa. Half the ship blew. Took twenty-seven men with it. Wasn’t anyone’s fault, really, but—I was the officer on duty. I was their lieutenant.”

Jimmy moves closer on the bench, until their shoulders are touching. Wayne turns and looks at him, patient, as though waiting for a cue.

“Talking about it—it doesn’t get easier, does it,” Jimmy says. His voice is hoarse—like a cracked reed, like the Delaware, Christmas night, 1776. Pushing up through the ice.

And he tells Wayne—he tells Wayne about his ship, about the freezing saltwater and hanging on _in the water with my dead—friend,_ and Wayne hears how his breath catches on the word.

“He wanted to go to New York, too, you know,” Jimmy says. “And he wanted to see London, Paris, St. Petersburg, all of it. He was an artist, knew everything from Rembrandt to Picasso. He said he had to visit every museum to figure out which one was the best. He should be here, not me. Not me.”

Jimmy is shaking—Wayne can feel the vibrations, through the place where their shoulders touch. Like a drumbeat, like a nightmare, like an army of ghosts.

Wayne lifts his arm and puts it around Jimmy’s shoulders. Jimmy stares at him for a second, then drops his head, takes off his glasses. Wayne looks at the painting, looks and looks until his eyes go crossed and the colors blur together, until all he can see is the cold metal of Washington’s foot on the bow, the same color as the churning water below.

They sit there, quiet, shaking together, until a security guard tells them the museum is closing.

Here’s the thing about New York City. Well, any city, but especially New York City. Walk long enough, and you will not know where you are. You can know how to get from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Astor Hotel in Times Square, you can write down the directions on a slip of paper and check every street sign to make sure you’re still on track, but you will still step in dog shit halfway down Fifth Avenue. The city is familiar and unfamiliar, and so are you, Wayne Wright. You are precise, impeccable, and you will step in dog shit.

And the rest of the band will laugh at you when you meet them for drinks, except that Davy will offer to switch shoes with you, and Jimmy will buy you a drink because it was his fault really for distracting you, and Donny will make up a little song about the dog shit, and Julia will sing it with Johnny providing tabletop percussion, and Nick will laugh at the whole thing like it’s the best shit he’s ever heard, and—maybe you’re glad you stepped in dog shit, after all.

New York City is a glittering cacophony: too many lights to count.

Wayne has tried, of course. Five nights in a row at the Astor, he has gone out to the balcony, and he has counted. He can get up to ten sometimes, fifteen, even twenty, but then a plane flies over from the nearest airfield, or a car on the street speeds by too fast, or one of the streetlights shifts from red to green, or he realizes he’s counted the Empire State Building twice.

And so tonight, he goes out to the balcony again. He goes without his jacket—warm despite the wind or in spite of it, buoyed by whiskey and remembered laughter. They really shouldn’t have drank so much, the broadcast is tomorrow, but—well, the broadcast is tomorrow.

Tonight he goes out to the balcony without a jacket, and Nick follows him, steps into the wind easily as opening his lips for a middle C. Nick doesn’t have a jacket either. And he lost his tie, maybe a shirt button or two, and his hair is coming free from the gel, curls flying up and in his face.

Five nights: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Five nights is plenty of time for Nick to fully inhabit his side of the room: suit jackets thrown over chairs, trumpet lying out on the dresser, shoes at obtuse angles at the foot of the bed. Wayne picked up a bit, on Thursday—folded the pants and jackets, placed them on Nick’s suitcase. Stacked the sheet music. Righted the shoes. But by Saturday, the clutter had returned.

At home, Nick has three piles. Clean, bearable, ready for washing. At home, Wayne can tell Nick to fold the laundry after he’s been to the laundromat, and Nick can tell Wayne to leave his piles alone the next day. Here—New York City, this balcony, this cacophony of light—the rules don’t apply. Here, Wayne lingers, pauses halfway through the folding. Pauses in the space between bars.

“You leave your clothes on the floor,” he says.

His voice is lifted by the wind and carried—echoes might reach the neon lights, the taxi turning onto 45th Street, the birds winging in from Central Park in the morning.

Nick turns, his face illuminated by the stars and the city lights. He’s all shapes and shadows—the long plane of his nose, the angle of his jaw, the hollows beneath his eyes. This light is new but the shapes are familiar as a twelve-bar blues, open fifths ready to be filled.

“Yeah, and you pick them up and put them where they shouldn’t be,” Nick says.

It’s a familiar argument, but this too is lit differently—re-colored, re-tuned. The acoustics are different, above the city and under the wind.

If Nick played long enough, he could blow right into the next jazz movement. If Wayne could only stop hiding in harmonics and houses of cards, perhaps he could follow.

“I’m sorry,” Wayne says.

Nick moves closer. One step, two steps, three. The articulation is not easy, even when you know the rhythm. Wayne has had too much to drink, and not enough. The wind rages above them, the city lights sing below.

“Don’t be,” Nick says.

And he takes Wayne’s face in his hands—warm, and too close, and not close enough.

“Are you certain?” Nick asks.

He pauses—arched over Wayne on the bed, his body a long curve like a bridge or a fermata, stretching into the unknown. His shirt is open and he’s breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling so intensely, it seems to command the entire room.

He hadn’t paused—when he crossed the distance finally out on the balcony, when he brought his hands up to cup Wayne’s face, when Wayne pressed him up against the glass door and kissed down his neck, tasted the salty sweat and whiskey and fading cologne.

Wayne has been divorced for two months. He’s been in New York City for five days. But none of that matters, really—time is fluid, after all, can be frozen in a memory, fired out of a silver pistol or stretched, with a long look across a crowded bandstand, with a high C and a trill and a lip slur down the octave.

Wayne reaches up and puts a hand on Nick’s chest. The world narrows: Nick’s heart beating, loud as a bass drum. Unsteady but constant. _Moderato espressivo, rubato,_ accent on one and three.

_I’ll play this melody if you’ll play harmony. I’ll be responsible for you if you’ll be responsible for me._

“Nicholas Joseph Radel,” Wayne says—and smiles a little at the way Nick’s breath hitches, the way he can feel it, warm beneath his palm, “I have never been so certain of anything in my life.

And it’s easier, after that: transposing a familiar counterpoint. Nick is heavier than he was twelve years ago, sharper in some places and scarred in others, but he still gasps when Wayne kisses down his chest, yelps when Wayne bites at his hip, arches off the bed when Wayne licks up between his thighs and _shouts,_ loud enough to echo off the walls, when Wayne takes him, the whole trembling length of him, in his mouth. Nick has never been able to stay quiet and Wayne used to hate it, used to _shh_ and clamp down and watch the door, but now he _listens,_ tries to count every sound and then loses himself in the rhythm. No time to write out a solo, only this movement, this warmth, this place where their bodies meet growing louder.

**three.**

> _Sometimes we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us, I got it from my pianist, Joe Zawinul, who wrote this tune, and it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kind-of problem. It’s called, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.  
>    
>  __—_ _Cannonball Adderley introducing[Mercy, Mercy, Mercy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQprFhWYr0s)_

“I couldn’t count them all,” Wayne says, after.

“What?” Nick asks. He rests a hand, idle, on Wayne’s chest, as though checking to make sure he’s still here, hasn’t faded into shadow.

“The lights, in the view from our balcony,” Wayne explains. “I’ve tried, but I keep losing count.”

“They’re still beautiful, though,” Nick says. “You can remember that.”

And Nick rolls onto his side, pulls Wayne close, and leads him into dreamless sleep.

_“You were amazing tonight,” Nick says._

_Wayne looks up from loosening his tie and there he is in the mirror, profile half cut off by a crack that the owners of this place are too cheap to fix. Nick is leaning against the doorway of the backstage performers-only bathroom, arms crossed over his chest, jeans tight on his hips, grinning like he was the one who just played a set to a sold-out club on a Wednesday in the middle of December._

_“How’d you get in this time?” Wayne asks, not turning around._

_Nick takes that as an invitation, drops his coat on the closed toilet seat. (Wayne itches to pick it up, this is a second-rate establishment but they at least have_ hangers, _doesn’t he have any idea how dirty that is.)_

_“I said I was your brother.”_

_And now Wayne turns, frowning. His navy-blue tie hangs loose around his neck. “We look nothing alike.”_

_Nick shrugs. “Didn’t seem to matter.”_

_He’s barely a foot away now—dark curls and bright eyes and the scent of cheap beer. And then suddenly he’s closer—he’s fingers hooking into Wayne’s belt loops, lips finding Wayne’s neck._

_“Have I mentioned,” Nick says, voice lower now, “how much I hate those pants?”_

_Wayne should step away. Wayne should run away, actually—or he should pull Nick to some empty alley or bedroom or black hole where nobody could stroll by and see them—_

_Wayne cups Nick’s cheek with one hand, grasps a stray curl with the other, gasps into his mouth like this is his first proper breath after a thirty-two bar solo._

_“What’s wrong with these pants?” Wayne asks, five minutes later._

_“They’re too tight,” Nick replies. He’s fingering the zipper on those pants as he speaks, and Wayne feels blood rush to meet him. “Everyone out there could bounce a fucking penny off the curve of your ass.”_

_“What, and only you should be able to bounce a penny off the curve of my ass?” Wayne retaliates, aiming for deadpan but landing closer to breathless._

_“Exactly.”_

_And Nick drops to his knees there on the bathroom floor—there on the_ dirty bathroom floor _in a_ second-rate club _on a_ sold-out Wednesday in December, _god, the_ door is still open _—but Wayne only braces himself against the sink—closes his eyes—lets organized piles fall to pieces in his mind like a final fermata, long and wild and free._

_“Once I graduate, we’re gonna make it big,” Nick says, between phrases. “We’re gonna team up, go to New York, play every club, charm every crowd, and do this—and do this in every goddamned bathroom. It’s ours. It’s all ours.”_

_When Nick stands back up, Wayne’s hands are going white, clenched too-tight on the sink. Nick pries one off carefully, carefully, as though easing into a ballad, and kisses each knuckle._

It’s all ours, _he says, and Wayne almost believes him._

Dawn comes, quiet, through the curtains.

Wayne hears it first: the birds start chirping, syncopated _good mornings_ in twenty different pitches. Then he sees the light rising, rising, their windows must be facing west because the sun itself is indiscernible but the indigo is giving way to soft gray, to brilliant blue, as steady and certain as a river flowing to the sea.

Nick, too, is soft, in the daylight. His features are rounded out, smoothed, tinted faintly pink by the curtains against their balcony windows. His lips are curved up in a faint smile, and he clutches the sheet, tight, and Wayne wonders if he has gone back in time, or if Nick’s ghosts are hovering above him, patient, and will wait for daylight to sink back in.

Wayne wishes, for a moment, that he were an artist—skilled with charcoal or watercolor, able to wrangle words like Julia or melody like Donny, anything that would let him capture this—Nick, softened in the dawn, free from shadows, the curl of his hair and the curve of his cheek.

But he has no charcoal or words, only his fingertips, reaching out and stroking back the curls from Nick’s forehead, cradling the scoop of his chin, running along the faint stubble. They never had this, in that few months after high school. Never had the dawns, the birds, the soft gratitude of waking with another body close enough to touch.

Wayne traces down Nick’s chin to his throat, his collarbone, the scars patterned feather-intricate down his right arm, the veins running through his wrist, the rough callouses on his palm. And then he is caught—his right hand clenched tight, Nick’s fingers curled around his.

“Hey,” Nick says.

Wayne looks, and Nick is smiling—beaming, as though his shadows are still hovering, waiting, pushed out for the moment by brilliant dawn.

“Good morning.” Wayne lifts their joined hands and presses a kiss to Nick’s palm—careful, reverent, the breath before a long crescendo.

Nick’s breath hitches, and Wayne smiles at how he’s staring, as though this might be a dream.

And so Wayne leans in—Nick tastes of stale beer and approximately ten thousand bacteria, but this is too important, this is the sun echoing through the window, this is the city roaring to life outside, this is the contest they’re about to win.

“Good morning,” Wayne says again, and he knows from the way Nick is staring that he’s grinning, too.

Wayne believes they can win, right up until the moment Jimmy pulls out that contract.

He started believing it sometime between champagne on the Pullman car, Donny yelling at them all that _yes_ he bought the most expensive bottle, _shut up,_ they _deserve it,_ and Nick kicking his shin under the table at breakfast that morning and beaming when Wayne looked up. And he kept it, kept the confidence tucked under his diaphragm, a drumbeat or a train engine. _We can win this, we can win this, we can win this, we—_

We don’t own our song. Our stories. _If you go on that stage,_ Jimmy says, _they will own the rights—_

Walk away, right now, or they’ll flatten you. Push you down to two dimensions and stick you in a painting, a TV reel, a newspaper ad for Bayer fucking Aspirin.

And what is a veteran, anyway? Is it the men in the painting, rowing Washington’s boat across the Delaware without even a name to call their own, or is it the men on a bench out front, sitting shoulder to shoulder, trying and trying and trying to stand under the weight of their ghosts? Is it the lyrics in the swing tune or the men who play behind it? Is it the static newscaster on the radio or is it Johnny asking for the set list five times with a nervous laugh—is it Davy throwing back a beer with one hand and holding tight to his bass with the other—is it Nick tossing and turning beneath the covers, waking up and sitting bolt-upright then lying back slowly, slowly, as though he still can’t believe this is a real bed?

Wayne joined the marines because he thought America dealt in freedom. But America deals in smokescreens—pantomime and theater, with no place in the contract for the men behind the music.

The guys talk of cutting their losses and going home, but he, for one, is tired of pretending. What did they even come to New York for, what did they even make it home for, what did they even _form this band_ for, if not to play?

When Wayne speaks, he hears gunfire in his head. But he transposes it to drumbeats, and marches forward.

_“Screw these people! All they want to do is use our uniforms, and wave us around like props. We’re not props, Donny. And we are not for sale. We’ve already given them everything we’ve got. We are goddamn United States veterans. And they wouldn’t know real sacrifice if it slapped them in the face.”_

“Don’t think about the rules,” Nick said once, in a golden band room a lifetime ago. “Just play what you’re feeling.”

Take everything you’re feeling, everything your band is feeling, your audience, your _world_ —breathe it in, and push it out through your instrument. Push it out through your instrument, lift it into melody. Each performance is a part of yourself, scorched into the open and set free. A firework, or the prelude to a star.

Wayne wasn’t meant to solo in this tune. It was a piece for Julia, for Nick, maybe for Jimmy—a slow ballad, a golden husband returning. But on this stage, the painting becomes a stained glass window, Julia inverting his reflection and singing it back out at him. On this stage, the ballad becomes a battle-cry. _Faster, faster, faster—_ and on this stage there is space for Wayne to solo. There is feeling enough.

Nick stands beside him—trumpet held tight, bell pointed straight ahead, knuckles clenched as though the brass is all that keeps him from tumbling. Twelve years of anger in terse articulations, soaring melody—

_Wayne is never free, schedules out his day—_

Breathe in, breathe out. Through the lungs, through the instrument. To the end of the phrase. Break the rules, Wayne, maybe the sky won’t fall—or maybe the rules have to be broken. Maybe the smokescreen has to be torn down to build a home in its place.

Wayne is three tight tenuto notes and two long tones, descending. He is the ghosts on his back, the pistol pressed to his forehead. He is the sink cluttered with dishes and the city skyline glittering in the moonlight. And he is a foundation, rising, rising, standing.

Facing the spotlight.

_Blow it up._

The train ride back is quiet.

The Pullman car tickets were only one-way so now they’re in the cheap seats, where windows stink of soot and the seats rattle with the forward momentum, as though they’re sitting inside a snare. Everyone except Julia had to stand at first, when they pulled out of Grand Central, but by Poughkeepsie they’ve got two rows: Donny, Julia, Jimmy, and Johnny on one side, and Davy, Nick, and Wayne on the other. The overhead compartments are empty, but Wayne keeps his trombone at his feet anyway.

The ride feels longer, this time. No champagne, no music, no laughter. Just the roll of the landscape outside the window, green fields tinted in gray. Just the press of the seats, sticky leather over too-thin wood. Just Nick’s profile, the harsh lines of his frown fading to shadow as the sun dips down beneath the horizon. Just the rattle of the train, endless, _why’d you do that, why’d you do that, why’d you do that, why—_

They go back to Donny’s apartment, after. Pile all their cases on the side table like they’re going to rehearse, but Donny pulls a bottle of vodka out from his kitchen cabinet and demands they all do shots, his voice as intense as when he tells them to repeat that run until they’re perfectly matching articulation. (He doesn’t say, _I was saving this for when we won_ —it’s easy to read, in the way he plops down at the piano, starts slamming out chords that might be Rachmaninoff, heavy minor sevenths like church bells at a funeral.)

One drink turns into six, Rachmaninoff turns into muddled Gershwin turns into impromptu duets—Nick plucking out the bassline to _Heart and Soul_ while Donny improvises in the upper register, Johnny and Davy backing them up by tapping on the lid of the piano, Jimmy on accompaniment if howling laughter can be called accompaniment, Julia singing along from the couch, nearly slipping off the seat every time the melody starts over—and Wayne is hazy with it, the world spinning and contracting, his vision gone golden as though there’s a tiny sun burning in this apartment, burning just for them, and he’s thinking maybe they’ll be alright, the seven of them, even if they can never play another show again.

And that, of course, is when the first reporter calls.

“We should tell them, right?” Nick asks.

It’s been one month since they returned from New York, and Wayne still isn’t used to this. Not the sudden fame and the calls for interviews and the tour plans—all that is expected, or at least deserved, or at least easily added to a schedule. But _this—_ Nick’s body in the bed, warm and solid, his arm up against Wayne’s chest, his fingers idly stroking Wayne’s hair, their legs tangled together in the sheets—this is still new. Impossible to categorize or flatten.

It’s warm today, even though it’s January, with the sunlight streaming into their bedroom. Or perhaps it always gets this warm, around noon, and Wayne has simply never lain in this late before.

“It’s only fair,” Wayne says. He shifts to lie on one side, watches the way Nick’s curls fall on the pillow, the way his eyes reflect the sun. “Everyone’s known about Donny and Julia since the night she first sang with us.”

 _And half of them probably know about us already._ Davy knows their history, Jimmy gave him a Look after the train ride home, Johnny is more perceptive than he appears. Julia simply knows everything.

Nick names some protest about social ostracism and legal action, which Wayne shoots down with a glare. Other people might ostracize them, yes, but not this band. They’re too good at their respective instruments, or at least Nick is. And besides, this band has walked through fire for each other already.

Nick must gleam some of this, because he reaches up and drags Wayne down to kiss him. Wayne gets distracted for a while after that—lost in the interplay of lips, teeth, tongue. Nick is a selfish musician, all trumpet players are, but he’s selfless at this, always giving, always sharing his warmth.

“What are we telling them, though?” Wayne asks, flopping back on his pillow after some undetermined number of minutes.

“About us?” Nick lies down beside him, rests his head on Wayne’s shoulder. His hair is soft where it touches Wayne’s cheek.

“I know, but I mean—what are we?” Wayne says. “Seeing each other? That seems too temporary an expression.”

“Fucking,” Nick suggests. Wayne sits up, twists around to stare at him.

“What? It’s accurate.”

Wayne looks at him—lying back on the headboard, hair a mess, lips bright red, leering—feels a twisting in his stomach, an insane rush of affection.

“It’s crude, though,” Wayne says, finally. “Not a full representation.” He sits back on his heels, runs through a few definitions in his head. “What about partners? That’s a good word, multipurpose, can imply romance or sex or even business, depending on the context—”

“Permanent, though,” Nick says. “I mean, it—it implies—a relationship that will last a long time.”

There’s a lift in his chin, now—haughty, as though steeling himself.

Wayne leans in, reaches out and lifts that chin up ever so slightly, adjust the angle of Nick’s face so that he can press a kiss there, the corner of his mouth, soft but with feeling.

“Yes, my dear,” he says. “That’s the idea.”

Nick stares, and makes a noise—something like a gasp but choked off, unable to contain itself.

“Oh, and of course they won’t ostracize us,” Wayne asks, still balancing Nick’s chin on his index finger. “Everyone knows about Jimmy already.”

“What—Jimmy? Jimmy’s—”

“You’ve seen the blue plaid pants, right?”

Nick splutters, in surprise or indignation, but Wayne is kissing him again before he can decide which.

“Now, nobody get nervous,” Donny says.

Backstage at the Rainbow Room, there’s a small chandelier. Not as expansive as the one in the main room, of course, and less extravagant—just eight candles strung up in loops of metal, nothing dangling, nothing dangerous. But Wayne can’t stop looking at it, pacing around it to get different angles, checking that there really are eight candles, and none of them is about to fall.

Backstage at the Rainbow Room, there’s a small chandelier, and there’s too much space—the band’s voices, their whispers and warmups, echo on the marble walls as though they’re shouting everything from the top of the Empire State Building.

“Don’t get nervous yourself,” Nick shouts back.

“I’m _not_ nervous, that’s why I’m telling _you_ all—”

“Guys.” Jimmy steps in, speaking around the reed in his mouth. Wayne counts two spare reeds in his pockets and one more sticking out of the brim of his hat. “We’re all nervous. This is the goddamn Rainbow Room.”

“Yeah, thanks, I had no idea,” Davy replies, his voice about as flat as his slicked-down hair.

“Guys!” It’s Julia this time, emerging from her dressing room—this place has fucking _dressing rooms_ —in a scarlet dress with an immense skirt pooling at her feet, her hair pulled back—it’s almost comical how Donny goes speechless at the sight of her.

“We’ve practiced,” she says. “We’ve tuned. We’ve played new sets after far less rehearsal than this. We’ve got this.”

She’s wobbling, though—the turn-out angle is too wide on her heels.

They will start with _Nobody,_ in a few minutes. It’s a good opener, with a fast bassline to get the crowd dancing and enough energy for everyone to solo. They’ll come in one at a time, with a wave of Donny’s hand: Johnny on drums, digging a foundation, then Davy on bass, laying the concrete, and then Wayne on trombone, building the frame, and then Jimmy on saxophone and Nick on trumpet, scaling up the harmonies, and then finally Julia—sweet, shimmering Julia—projecting for them all.

_You know who tells me, you don’t have what it takes and you will never reach the top?_

All eyes will be on her, her red dress, her curls. Wayne sees the spotlight already focusing.

He’ll build up the foundation in a few minutes, might as well do it here first. He rests his trombone on a nearby chair, takes three steps forward, and wraps Julia in an embrace.

She’s shaking, already sweating through her perfume. She’s a bit taller than he is in the heels. And she’s hugging back—her arms around his shoulders, her posture steadying.

“What was that for?” Julia asks, after they’ve stepped back.

“Confidence,” Wayne says.

She grins, and stands taller. Donny swoops in, presses a kiss to her cheek—and Wayne feels Nick step closer and grab his hand for a moment, warm and solid.

“Alright, band,” Donny says. “Blow it up.”

It’s a small bar, sandwiched between an Italian restaurant and an ice cream shop down on Bleecker Street. There’s no sign, just a black door with a golden handle and a bouncer who asks for fifty cents each then looks them up and down, scowling.

Nick gives the guy a grin—crooked, paired with a wink—and shifts his hand into Wayne’s back pocket, fingers inching just above the curve of his ass. Wayne swallows a yelp.

The bouncer nods, steps aside. Only when they pass does Nick notice that his boots have four-inch heels.

“So, what do you think?” Nick asks. There’s a lightness in his steps as he leads Wayne across the room, their hands swinging into each other.

Wayne looks. It’s just like any other bar—long table, high stools, dim lighting, cabinets across the back stacked with glass bottles, several strategically-placed trash cans—except it isn’t, not when he looks closer. The patrons are all men, except for one person at the end of the bar who’s dressed like a princess but has the shoulders of a farmer. All men, except that they’re leaning into each other, faces tinted pink with booze or gold with fluorescent lights, laughing too-open. The fellow in the leather jacket and the one with the slicked-back blonde hair and bowtie, they keep bumping noses, this close to a kiss.

“I don’t know,” Wayne says. “It’s—it’s different.”

Nick smiles—different from the one he gave the bartender, sweeter, but with the same edge. “That’s the point.”

He ghosts a hand over Wayne’s hip, fingers drumming lightly over the top of Wayne’s belt.

“I’ll go get us some drinks,” he says.

Nick is different, under these lights. He’s half-shadowed, faint gold in the fluorescents like the memory of sunlight, but that’s not it exactly—he’s lighter, edges smoothed, as though he has been bearing a burden all his life and suddenly every person in the club is helping him lift. He goes up to the bar, and Wayne watches how he rolls up his sleeves, leans over the counter, leans into the bartender—a dark-skinned man in a pressed shirt and vest—and touches his wrist.

“There’s this bar I want to take you to,” he’d said at breakfast that morning, overcooked scrambled eggs and Ella Fitzgerald on the radio. “Someone I know from Philly told me I had to go, if I was ever in New York. It’s a place where…” And here he’d paused, chewed, swallowed. “You’ll see. It’s hard to describe.”

He’s _comfortable,_ Wayne realizes, standing a few feet in front of the entrance with his coat still on. Nick hasn’t been to this bar, but he’s been to others like it—in Cleveland, Philly, who knows where else. He knows how to lean into men with slicked-back hair and bowties, how to touch their wrists, make them laugh. But more than that, he knows how to _be_ comfortable here—in his suit, his skin, his eyes that want to watch and his fingers that want to touch.

“You okay?” Nick asks. He’s balancing a glass of whiskey in each hand, and he’s still grinning, all those watts now a spotlight on Wayne.

Wayne nods, then shrugs, then follows as Nick steers him to a table, tall and circular, the counter sticky from past patrons. He takes one of the glasses and drains half in one go—the alcohol burns his throat, but it’s warm going down.

Nick avoids his own drink for the moment, instead reaches across the table for Wayne’s hand. Wayne pulls it back, hides both palms under the table.

“It’s okay,” Nick says softly. “We can do that here.”

“Look, you—I don’t have a lot of experience with this.” Wayne is going for a whisper, but he’s afraid he’s failing, afraid the whole world will hear.

“Okay, so we’ll go slow.” Nick leans in—offers his right hand, palm up. “I want to show you that—that there are places like this. But I know it’s strange, so—one step at a time, alright? Could we just hold hands?”

This is gentler than Wayne has seen him since before the war, and he wonders—ducks his head and tries not to picture the other men Nick might have done this with, Cleveland or Philadelphia or even New York, taken their hands and looked at them beautiful and open and played them his interpretation of _My Funny Valentine_ and—

Nick grabs his hand. His fingers are cool with condensation from the drinks, but his grip is steady, steady, solid.

Wayne looks up. Nick is staring at him—his face is caught in shadow but his eyes are bright, focused only on Wayne.

He waited, after all. Wayne went off and had two kids and fought a war and they still landed back here, this table in Greenwich Village, this tiny space between their palms.

Holding hands. It’s strange and beautiful and terrifying, that there’s a space for this. Like there should be another world out there where Nick and Wayne can be the normal ones, where they can have the house and the dog and the two kids.

Wayne lifts their joined hands and presses a kiss to Nick’s knuckles—slow, warm.

“One step at a time,” he agrees.

And Nick looks back at him, shining.

The steps, as it turns out, are as follows: holding hands; one more drink; dancing; two more drinks; kissing in a corner of the club—one more drink—Wayne pressing Nick up against the bathroom wall and marking him, telling the world with teeth and tongue that this man is _his—_ a glass of water and hamburgers from a deli down the block—a taxi home. Nick’s head pillowed on Wayne’s shoulder, their hands clasped together.

They’ve been in New York for two weeks when Evelyn calls.

It’s half an hour before the performance—Wayne is adjusting his tie in the green room mirror, debating if he should run through the end of _I Got a Theory_ again, when a waiter pokes his head in the door.

“I’m sorry to call here when you must be playing soon,” Evelyn says once he answers. “I didn’t know where you’re staying, but I know you’re playing here. It’s in all the papers.”

“It’s fine, I’ve warmed up already,” he answers on instinct. And then, nearly dropping the phone—“Evelyn? Why are you—are the kids okay? I can be back tonight if you need me—”

“No, no, nothing like that,” she replies. It’s strange, how different she sounds on the phone. Muffled, cut through static, as though she’s shouting from the other side of a crowded street.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” she goes on. “I watched the broadcast, you know. And I read the profile of the band, the one in the _Times._ And I’d like to—to apologize. I don’t think I was fair to you. I didn’t realize how hard it was for you, over there or when you got back, and I’m sorry.”

“I—thank you,” Wayne says. His fingers are shaky where he’s holding the phone. He tightens his grip. “I appreciate you saying that. But whatever you heard, or read, it doesn’t excuse my behavior. You can’t run a family the way you run a platoon.”

Evelyn chuckles a little, at that. Her laugh is low, almost unfamiliar. “That’s one way to put it. Don’t misinterpret, Wayne—I still think we’re better off separated. I can take care of myself. But I’d like you to see the kids more. Grady keeps asking for you, you know. He bought your record last week, thought I wouldn’t notice if he hid it in with the blues albums.”

Wayne tries to picture that. His son, with his record. Paying the two dollars, carrying it home carefully in a paper bag, maybe slipping it out of the cardboard and running a finger over the smooth plastic.

“Wayne? You there?”

Wayne blinks at himself in the mirror—presses the receiver closer to his ear, the metal digging into soft flesh.

“Dinner, once a week,” Evelyn says. “Can you manage that, once you’re back in Cleveland? And then maybe we can work up to weekends.”

“Yes.” Wayne grips the receiver, his knuckles going white. “Yes, that sounds perfect.”

Evelyn tells him to call when he gets back, he agrees, and then he returns the receiver—the clang echoes, loud in the quiet green room.

Quiet?

Wayne looks around, spinning slowly—oh. The whole band is staring at him.

“I, um.” He pauses, clears his throat. “That was Evelyn. She wants me to have dinner with the kids once a week, once we’re back.”

Julia rushes in, throws her arms around his neck. “I’m so happy for you,” she whispers.

And then Davy is patting him on the back, and Johnny is grinning at him, and Donny is offering him a drink—and it’s only Nick, adjusting his jacket on the other side of the room, who stays put. Doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

The table is cold.

Wayne wasn’t expecting this—the table has been outside all morning, warming from the heat of the sun. But then, Bryant Park has shady areas, and it’s not too out of the ordinary to find a spot that hasn’t managed to warm.

He has been sitting at this table for two hours and thirty-six minutes, with one break to piss in the bathroom at the New York Public Library. In that time, he has seen seventeen dogs, five tourist groups, eight packs of college girls, eleven old women wearing hats that seem to defy the laws of physics, and twenty-four families with children. He is keeping count of each person who enters his line of vision, of course, but it is the families he keeps watching. It is the fathers with their hats and briefcases and responsibility. It is the mothers with their skirts and gloves and purses large enough to hold several sandwiches, it is the little girls with ice cream on their faces, it is the little boys with baseball caps ever so slightly too big for their foreheads. Wayne traces the movement of their step, keeps count of their lunches, their maps, their frisbees spinning in the sun.

Bryant Park is one big maze of metal tables, spindly trees, and water fountains, with a green lawn in the middle. It’s perfect for people-watching—for disappearing into the families who pass him, not noticing the ghost of a father in their midst, and Wayne sits at his table even as the clouds roll in and the sun gives way to fog, then to rain.

The table is cold. This is what he focuses on. The press of cold metal against the soft cotton of his slacks, the condensation forming on his skin. The tallies in his mind, numbers as easy and logical as the chord progression of a twelve-bar blues.

“Wayne.”

And it all goes scattering again—Nick is standing at the side of his table, jacket unbuttoned, dark curls flattened by the rain—it must be raining harder than Wayne realized. His eyes are dark and glittering, and something in his expression reminds Wayne of the clouds far above.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” he tells Nick. “You’ll catch a cold. And your hair is getting ruined.”

“You didn’t tell her, did you?”

Nick’s voice is sharp as breaking glass. He stops himself, takes a step forward, reaches out as though to grab Wayne’s shoulders and _shake_ —then stops again and steps back to where he was before. This is so far from his usual brash confidence and Wayne hates it, hates that he knows he’s done this but doesn’t know how to fix it.

“You didn’t tell her. Come on, why else would you be sitting in this fucking park in the middle of a fucking thunderstorm—”

The sky cracks open as though for emphasis, as though Nick summoned it, and this would be like a scene out of a movie if it weren’t so three-dimensional, if Wayne couldn’t feel the angle of Nick’s fist, the clench of his jaw, the whole coiled hurricane of him.

He was a grinning kid in a golden band room once, ninety-six lockers shining in the morning sun, he was open chords and easy melodies and the first four bars of a Sousa march. And then Wayne shattered him—oh, the war shattered him, but Wayne got there first, left him on the floor of the bathroom in the back of a second-rate club, a footnote in the margins, the thunder before the hurricane or the artillery—

“It’s fine,” Nick says, between raindrops. “It’s fine. I get it. I shouldn’t have asked you to tell her. I’m just a dalliance, right? A prelude to your real relationships. Unsustainable. You’d still be with her if it weren’t for the fucking war, right? And you can’t go back to her if you tell her. I get it. I get it.”

 _I get it,_ he says, but he’s coiled behind the dam, a hurricane or a flood. The Hudson should rise, Wayne thinks. Rise and bury him, here at this table in the middle of an empty park, after all the responsible fathers who served their countries and came back shining have climbed to the top floor of the nearest skyscraper. It would be only fair.

“I’ll see you at rehearsal,” Nick says.

He spins on his heel and marches out into the storm, and Wayne sits at that cold metal table, sits and sits and sits, until the rain recedes and the warblers begin to sing.

_“What would’ve happened, if it weren’t for the war, if it weren’t for the band? Would you be over there with your nice house and your two kids and me on the outside, still pining?”_

Wayne waits for Donny to finish packing up. Stands there, quiet, by the piano, coat already buttoned, hat in one hand and trombone case in the other.

Donny is running a rag across the keys, wiping off his sweat—he’s halfway through humming one of the new tunes when he notices the figure at his elbow.

“Jeez, Wayne, you startled me. What’s up?”

“ _Fools Rush In._ Our cover.”

“Yeah, what about it? I think it’s pretty good, don’t you, those backing riffs are simple but so elegant, if you tell me to bring your part down I’ll fight you right here—”

“No, it’s not that. The arrangement is fine.”

“Then what is it?”

“I want to sing it.”

Donny looks at him, piercing, as though he’s taking the tune of Wayne’s request and extrapolating it into a symphony. They didn’t tell the band they were on the outs, but Donny’s a good drill sergeant, he can see when his trumpet and trombone won’t look at each other between songs.

“Without rehearsing?” Donny asks. “You sure you can keep the beat?”

Wayne nods. “I’ve practiced it on my own, a few times.” Or a few hundred, with the record player blaring and an empty bottle of whiskey as his microphone, but Donny doesn’t need to know that.

“Alright, well.” Donny looks from Wayne to his keyboard and back, then sighs and shuffles his sheet music, takes the chart back out. “Take your coat off, man. We can run through it a couple times now.”

It’s a slow song, a sweet song. The kind of melody that runs through your fingers like molasses on a summer day, the kind of lyrics that belong on a Hallmark card, wreathed in roses and cartoon hearts. Wayne’s hands are shaking as he sings it—he spends the first verse terrified he’ll drop the mic, then finally turns on the second. Turns to Nick like a compass, like a ship steering home.

Nick is wide-eyed, red-faced. Nick is staring, and this is like their jazz concerts in high school when Nick would power his own personal spotlight whenever Wayne soloed. This is just like high school, except that this is nothing like high school.

On the third verse, Wayne steadies his grip on the mic. He looks at Nick, and Nick looks back.

(It shouldn’t be physically possible, but Wayne would swear Jimmy is laughing at him as he plays the final clarinet riff.)

The bathroom door slams.

Wayne shuts off the sink, turns – barely has a second to open his mouth before he’s backing up into the far wall, his back hitting with a dull _thud._

“You… you… you…” Nick’s pointer finger jabs at Wayne’s face in time with his broken-record vowels, his face is bright red, his hips are pressed against Wayne’s hips, his eyes—

“I’m sorry,” Wayne blurts out on the offbeats. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell Evelyn. I want her to know about us, I wish I could tell the whole world, but—Emily and Grady, Nick, I can’t risk losing them, I’m a coward but—I wish I could tell the whole world but you’re enough of the world, you and the rest of the band, you’re what keeps the earth spinning, so I just need you to know, I need you, I need—”

Nick cuts him off—meets him with a crash, all teeth and tongue and slick sweat.

“You fucking idiot,” Nick says, pulling back for a breath, his hands on Wayne’s cheeks and his eyes bright and god, god, Wayne would swim the Pacific for him.

Wayne leans in this time, and it’s two more long phrases, _andante molto espressivo,_ before Nick says, “Do you have any idea how fucking hard it was for me to watch you—stand there, a few feet behind you, and just play fucking _backgrounds,_ not—”

He crashes in again, kisses down Wayne’s neck this time, tearing at Wayne’s tie, his buttons—this shirt is gonna need another wash and it’s fine, he doesn’t care, he _doesn’t care_ —

Nick surfaces again and his eyes are bright, too bright, his cheeks are damp.

Wayne reaches up—soft, slow—and wipes the tears before they can drip down Nick’s chin.

“Am I forgiven?” Wayne asks.

 _“You fucking idiot,”_ Nick says again.

When they finally leave the bathroom half an hour later, sans two ties and several shirt buttons, Davy cheers, and Julia beams, and Jimmy bangs his beer on the table. Nick yells at them all to shut up, but he’s already buying the next round.

Wayne’s not sure what wakes him. A sound, a shift, a dip in the moonlight, or a cold space on the mattress beside him. This mattress is still too soft, too sweet after three weeks of leasing the place for their run at the Rainbow Room.

He lies there for a moment, still. This is New York City. Hell’s Kitchen. A third-floor walk-up with a door that creaks and flowerpots on the windowsills. Gardenias, he thinks, is what they’re growing. Or chrysanthemums. He’ll have to ask Nick later.

Wayne rolls over onto his back, then sits up, throws his legs over the side of the bed. The wood floor is cool on his bare feet as he pads out of the apartment, down the hallway, out the heavy cement door, and up the stairs to the roof.

It’s a chilly night, for June. Dry air, clouds, and wind swirling, threatening to knock him off. The view from 10th Avenue and 50th Street has nothing on the view from the Astor, but it’s still a comfort to see New Jersey spread out across the Hudson, glittering, like a beacon above a plane’s landing strip saying here, look, home is closer than you think. Wayne would estimate about two hundred lights; he hasn’t counted them.

Nick is sitting on an upturned crate, staring west. He’s got a beer bottle held loosely in his right hand, but it looks mostly full. He’s in a T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, his hair tousled as though the wind ran fingers through it. He’s shadowed, faint blue in the moonlight, yet he is the most solid thing Wayne has ever seen.

Wayne scans the perimeter and grabs a second crate, brings it over to sit next to Nick. Nick startles at the soft _thud_ of plastic hitting concrete and time freezes like that, for a second—Nick, eyes wide, and Wayne, moving closer.

Wayne sits. His arms are bare, his feet are cold. He probably should’ve put on shoes.

“You know, I stopped being able to improvise, after I got home,” he says.

Nick snorts, like he’s going to say something about wasting all the effort he put in to teach Wayne in the first place, but then stops himself, takes a swig of the beer instead.

“Yeah, it was…” Wayne sighs. “I don’t know what it was, exactly. Wound myself up real tight, trying not to think about everything. I had to write solos out for myself and hide them in my etude book, memorize them between rehearsals when nobody was looking.”

Nick does laugh, at that—throws his head back, harmonizes with the wind, and Wayne loves him, loves him, loves him.

It’s that laugh, or the memory of a bathroom wall, warm like he hasn’t been since high school, that gives Wayne the courage to go on.

“I can’t tell you that I wouldn’t still be with Evelyn, if it weren’t for the war,” he says. “And I can’t tell you that I don’t miss her. But I know that I missed _you_ —it’s been years of winding myself up, going through the motions, almost forgetting why I loved playing in the first place—you, Nick, you make me want to be more than that.”

“I missed you, too,” Nick says. Quiet, like the breath before a ballad. He raises his arm over his face suddenly—and his voice is hoarse as he goes on, “God, Wayne. Of course I fucking missed you. I’m sorry. I don’t want—I hate being angry about this, I want to just _have you_ —but I keep having nightmares of you leaving again, and–”

Wayne moves—the crate clatters to the ground and he’s kneeling on the cement, his hands are on Nick’s cheeks—Nick always runs so hot, always just this side of feverish, and Wayne wipes away his tears and wishes he could go deeper, wishes he could crawl inside Nick’s ribcage and build a breastplate there.

“What can I do?” Wayne asks.

Nick shakes his head, still crying—brings his hands up on top of Wayne’s, then moves them to Wayne’s shoulders, trembling. “I don’t know,” he says.

Wayne leans in—pulls Nick down until their foreheads are pressed together.

“Well, I’m gonna keep asking,” Wayne says. “I’m gonna make it up to you. And I’m not leaving, okay? I’m not leaving. I love you too much.”

Nick pulls back—Wayne’s hands slide down to his elbows, his right thumb pressed in the hollow of an old scar.

“Nick?” he asks.

Nick pulls back, and then he moves forward, and his crate is clattering to the ground too and he’s fumbling in the moonlight, moving in and shaking and reaching until finally he’s holding Wayne and the world narrows to this tiny circle, this contact, this calm.

“You asshole,” Nick says, pressing his face in Wayne’s collarbone, so warm Wayne thinks he might combust. “I was gonna say it first.”

And they go back to bed together, and they wake up together, and they play together, and they go back to bed together. And they go back to bed together, and it isn’t simple, and it isn’t perfect, but it gets easier. It gets easier, just this contact, just moving forward.

There are three pieces of paper hanging on the refrigerator of the Wright-Radel household.

First: Wayne’s schedule. He wakes at seven, usually, except for when he tries to sit up and finds a hand on his arm, tight and greedy, pulling him back into the warmth. He jogs two and a half miles to the park and back, except for when he walks the way home if he’s tired from the night before, or he wants to get those pastries Nick likes from the French bakery. He showers quickly, except for when the door slides open and Nick smirks at him in the mirror until he just has to be pulled in, still in his pajamas sometimes, has to be pressed up under the spray and kissed soundly. And he eats breakfast at eight, except for when he’s slept in, and he practices alone, except for when Nick pulls out his trumpet and plays counterpoint, and he goes to rehearsal in the afternoon, except for when Nick pulls him back into the bedroom for a nap.

He still plays at the community theater, but he’s left the big band and the commercial scoring studio, so when there’s no show playing and the band doesn’t have a gig, his evenings are free. And his evenings, he leaves open—for long dinners at fancy restaurants where Nick will loosen his tie halfway through the meal and insist on double dessert, for long walks to the lake in the evening where Nick will complain of the wind messing up his hair but keep his hand jammed in Wayne’s jacket pocket, and for long nights on their couch, listening to the radio and making fun of all the bands who aren’t quite in tune. Except for when it’s the Donny Nova Band on the radio, and they have to stop and look at each other, eyes wide, and Wayne says maybe his articulation was too harsh on that one, and Nick says no, shut up, _shut up,_ you’re perfect.

Second: Nick’s schedule. Not for his days, that is, but for his lessons. Two on Monday, three on Tuesday, a furious four on Wednesday, one on Thursday, and then none on Friday, when Nick likes to sleep in. Wayne wonders when Nick is going to stop teaching—since it didn’t happen after they returned from New York the first time, and it didn’t happen before they left for the big east coast tour, and it didn’t even happen before they left for the big _west_ coast tour—until he finally asks, a sunny September afternoon, after Nick bursts in swearing about how Alex, that little asshole, just can’t get the hang of double-tonguing.

Nick looks down at the question, his face flushed, and mumbles something about not wanting to abandon the bastards now that they’re finally learning something. Wayne smiles into his paper, and doesn’t mention it again. He does show up to Nick’s first teacher’s recital, though, with a bouquet of carnations and the rest of the band, and it takes every ounce of his willpower not to kiss the man right there in public when Nick beams with pride as Billy, his oldest protégé, makes it all the way through a whole Bach prelude without cracking a note.

And third: the list of compromises. It has grown now, from twelve to roughly twenty, although it’s hard to count precisely with all the inserted lines and scratched out sections and rude sketches in the margins. Nick can keep Wayne up late on a weekend night, if he goes to get coffee the next morning. Wayne can organize Nick’s clothes after he’s done laundry, if Nick picks out what Wayne will wear to the next gig. Nick can leave the dishes out after dinner, if he’s doing something (or someone) more important.

Nick offers, once the paper becomes entirely filled with ink and pencil marks in four different colors, all overlapping so much it’s barely legible, to copy the rules they’re actually keeping onto a new piece of paper.

Wayne leans in, kisses him gently. “No,” he says, “I like it just fine the way it is.”

They buy a bed.

It’s large—king size, the clerk at the furniture warehouse says, and Nick makes some snide comment about thinking kings went out of style with the American revolution. They pile it with pillows of all shapes and sizes (even though Wayne only needs one and Nick will punt the rest off in the middle of the night), and no fewer than three individual comforters, plus a quilt that Nick’s grandmother gave him when he was six and he’s kept ever since.

(Wayne realizes, a few weeks in, that it’s the same make of bed as the ones at the Astor, and needs to take a minute in the middle of rehearsal because of course Nick Radel, who can barely remember to wear a hat in January, would get sentimental about a bed.)

To break it in, so to speak, they invite the whole band over, plus Oliver and Mrs. Addams and enough other people that it becomes something like a party. They keep the bedroom door closed, and only the rest of the band knows that this is also a celebration of one year since a hotel balcony in New York City, although from the way Davy keeps waggling his eyebrows one would think they’re ready to don sparkly suspenders and shout their love from the rooftops.

(Wayne considers it for all of ten seconds, in the kitchen while grabbing more wine, and needs to dunk his face in the sink to wash the red off.)

And after, after most of the guests have gone and the wine has been finished and Donny has serenaded each individual guest in slant rhyme, they open the bedroom door. Jimmy pulls out a twenty-dollar bottle of whiskey and the guys pass it back and forth, all sprawled on this bed that is big enough for a king or a small army or a family returned home. Their ties are loose, their buttons undone, Donny’s arm around Julia’s shoulders as she laughs at something Johnny says. Wayne sits at the top of the bed surrounded—his foot is touching Donny’s and his left leg has Jimmy lying back on top of it and the tip of Johnny’s head is right by his waist. And Nick is beside him, his fingers tangled in Wayne’s, smiling loose and brilliant the way he once did in a high school band room back in 1932—smiling the way he once did or brighter, tinged with golden, the sunset over Lake Eerie on a clear day or the top of the Empire State Building.

On a normal Saturday, Wayne would have been asleep two hours ago. But tonight, he’s content to sit and drink and talk as his friends fall asleep around him. He keeps watch until he begins to doze, his fingers still safe in the warmth of Nick’s palm.

> _[Fools rush in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEtNgV13aA) where wise men never go. _  
>  _But wise men never fall in love, so how are they to know?_ _  
> _ _When we met I felt my life begin,_ _  
> So open up your heart and let this fool rush in._

**Author's Note:**

> \- the grand central scene in this fic is adapted from [a drabble I wrote two years ago](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11656860/chapters/26227491). I did have to go back to grand central and count the platforms again because, naturally, the nick pov version has the number wrong.  
> \- the music man is my one allotted anachronism here, in honor of geoff packard playing harold hill in chicago.  
> \- yell with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor).  
> \- thanks for reading, friends. I love you.


End file.
